In the lead-up to the 2016 election an essay by Michael Anton, titled “The Flight 93 Election,” was published, warning in stark terms of the unspeakably dire consequences to follow should “Hillary!” be permitted to occupy the Oval Office. Rush (RIP) read most, if not all, of the essay on his show and it immediately developed something akin to a cult following for very good and sound reasons, as a re-reading of it under today’s “dire circumstances” readily remind one.

It is my considered opinion that we may be seeing the emergence of a Flight 93 Election essay for our time, one which was read, in large part, by Tucker Carlson on his July 9, 2021, show and mentioned prominently by President Trump in his speech over the weekend at CPAC.

It is titled “The Disillusionment of the Deplorables: How Trump voters formed an ugly — and accurate – -view of America’s ruling elite” written by Daryl Cooper. It can be accessed here. While I will attempt to provide a few highlights in this brief discussion, I genuinely urge all who may have a real interest in, to “borrow” the title of Charles Murray’s new book, Facing Reality about the 2020 election, which I firmly believe history will prove was very probably the most brazenly corrupt election in American history.

And it may well not take the usual years or decades for that historical analysis to catch up with the massive theft many (and I count myself definitely in that number) believe took place judging by ongoing developments in the Arizona and Georgia audits.

It is my hope that you will let me know whether you feel this article is as important as I find it to be. I do so with my usual caveat that having a very thick skin was an absolute job requirement to survive as many years at the Trial Bar as I did, so please share your thoughts with me on the issues raised by this piece.

There are several great discussions of this piece available to which I refer for further consideration. In view of the fact that there have been excellent writings on this piece already, I decided to take a slightly different approach, one born of my conviction that every American should benefit from the clarity provided by this article, and that is to go largely paragraph by paragraph, commenting on each as I proceed with my own thoughts on those words—warts and all.

In launching this analysis, I must note that a comment I saw on Ricochet by @annefy sums up as succinctly as any I have seen my attitude after the last six months of lunacy in our Nation, so I set it out here as something of a preamble to the discussion to follow:

It’s weird – I’m finding this happening more often in my personal life; that things said or done are judged with zero context. The election, and some’s questioning of the results, happened after a series of appalling abuses. Most poignant (to me) was the comment that if lying, cheating, stealing etc were found, some have zero confidence that our institutions would be honest about it. Why would we?

We are in a scary time. I’m an average law-abiding citizen. But if an FBI agent asked me for the time, I’d refuse to answer.

My discussion will be based on the actual Twitter feed language as I found it much more direct and hard-hitting than the “sanitized” version which appeared in American Mind, linked above. The version I am working from can be found here.

WE ARE THE TEA PARTY PEOPLE AND KNOW WHEN WE’RE BEING LIED TO.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

These key paragraphs will almost certainly be ignored by the far-left Socialists who will refuse to acknowledge their central message which is that we searched for the truth about the election and tried to learn what we could but “were not particularly attached” to the various theories being espoused after the election. And, we, The Tea Party people, were proud to be members of the Tea Party movement and proud to be ardent, loud-and-clear, supporters of President Trump and all the True American principles he stands for. We are proud to hand out pocket Constitutions and, as we have done in our family, read aloud portions of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July. And this Tea Party person, who spent most of his life as a practicing lawyer, is especially offended and astounded and astonished that lawyers with our Justice Department would not only lie to a Federal Court, but alter record documents, and “skate” without a day of imprisonment. A big deal, indeed.

EVERYONE LIED!

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff – who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t – all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.

At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing. When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen.

We all know there have been times when it seems all politicians are lying about everything all the time but there always seems to be some kind of saving grace, some courageous person of honor (I know-I am really dating myself with that one!) who comes forward and blows the lid off, indictments handed down, convictions result, imprisonment follows, Lady Justice is once again triumphant. Where is that person today, a time when we have some of the highest officials in the (wretched, dreadful, thug-infested) the Obama administration have lied repeatedly under oath with such bottom feeders as Adam Schiff becoming almost a full-time employee of CNN and mouthing lies about Russia! Russia! Russia! as they were proven to be lies by his sworn testimony in “closed door” deposition sessions.

In another version of this article, published on Glenn Greenwald’s substack site, the author details the blatant lying of James Comey who lied openly in a manner that has resulted in many American citizens being imprisoned as was proven by the Inspector General’s report. A lawyer from way back in my early days in the practice had a saying which perfectly described Comey and his fellow liars- “he would lie when the truth would help him.” And, so he did, as outlined in this passage:

There’s no need to relive all the details of the Russia collusion scam. The point is that conservatives were following it all very closely, in real time, and they noticed when things didn’t add up. After James Comey told Fox News’ Bret Baier that, even at the time of their interview in April 2018, he didn’t know who had funded the Steele dossier, conservatives noticed when the December 2019 DOJ Inspector General’s report showed that he had been informed of the dossier’s provenance in October 2016. And they asked themselves: Why would he lie? Lying to investigators about one’s knowledge of or involvement in a potentially criminal act is often taken as consciousness of guilt.

AS WE KEPT LEARNING FACTS AN OUTLINE OF A REGIME EMERGED

We know as fact: a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op, c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious, d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

I remember reading the first few reports which later came to be known as “The Dossier” and thinking to myself- this is quite simply unbelievable. Turns out I was right, but the author is spot on in describing how many of us felt when this pile of [expletive] first came out as so many of us were genuinely worried that this may have actually happened and, not only that, who in the real world could possibly make up fictional fables like that out of thin air? And, indeed, sleazy people like Adam Schiff, Her Royal Speakership Pelosi, many members of the House and Senate, The Swamp, academia and, of course, the corporate media, lied day in and day out in total disregard for the truth and for their duty to the public. However, in the sweepstakes for the Sleaze of the Century, even in a competition with some of the All Stars listed above, none even came close to the slimiest sewer rat of all, Andrew Weissman, Mueller’s “attack dog”, who engineered such disgraces to the law as the Gestapo-style storming of the homes of Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, both in the early morning hours, and both including doing body searches of their wives while still in their nightclothes. As the author puts it, this really was “a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries.”

“THE REGIME” IS NOT PARTISAN; CENTRAL TO HOW WE MUST CHANGE OUR THINKING ABOUT “THE DEMS”, “THE DEEP STATE”, ETC.

….. A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan. They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

If Mr. Cooper’s invaluable essay has a single most important lesson for us Smelly Deplorable Walmart shoppers, it is encapsulated in these paragraphs. I remember Rush, RIP, making the point over and over again that for many of us, the difficulty in trying to understand or—even more impossible— reason with members of the Loon Wing of the Democrat Party was that we tried to approach them with the idea that they had the same set of standards as we have. Nothing could be farther from the truth and it is a total waste of time for anyone on the right to try to approach them with this fairy tale idea of “bipartisanship”, as proven most recently by the “agreement” on the (fraudulent) infrastructure bill only to have Biden immediately renege on it. The description of the reversal of the parties to Tulsi Gabbard vs. Jeb Bush is most telling and, once again, Mr. Cooper has described us to a “T.” The very idea that ANYone would dishonor our flag and/or anthem by kneeling during what we consider to be one of the most sacred demonstrations of love of country makes our blood boil. ”Shocking and disillusioning” is the most polite way of putting how we feel and what we would like to see done with pseudo-Americans who disgrace our Nation that way.

SAN FRANCISCO TREATS ITS HOMELESS PEOPLE BETTER THAN THE ANIMALS OF THE PRESS TREATED JUDGE KAVANAUGH AND HIS FAMILY.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

They watched the press behave like animals for four years. Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN. And CNN seems proud of that. They led a lynch mob against a high school kid. They cheered on a summer of riots.

They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t. It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

My notes in the margin of this piece state “This man has an uncanny way of transcribing my thoughts into his text.” I consider the Kavanaugh hearings one of the lowest points in American history and the press was not alone in acting like animals as they had a lot of real, stiff competition from the Democrat Senators, perhaps most notably and detestably, the present “Vice-President of the United States” as well as almost all of the cowardly Republican Senators who had to outsource their questions to an outside lawyer (who performed with great distinction) for fear of hurting the feelings of all the feminists who were so heavily invested in the slime spread by Blasey-Ford. The sole member of that committee who showed any backbone at all was Lindsey Graham who, that day at least, spoke for all of us who watched the savagery in disbelief and horror.

On a personal note, I must observe that those of us “of a certain age” who saw the disgrace of the Bork hearings, with Ted Kennedy as Chief Hangman, and the Clarence Thomas hearings with none other than the person now “serving” as our Potemkin President as the Chief Hangman and thought they couldn’t possibly get worse got a rude comeuppance in seeing just how low “our betters” can really go when they are sufficiently threatened as they were by Judge Kavanaugh.

“BUT WHEN THE FOUR CRITICAL SWING STATES (AND ONLY THOSE STATES) WENT DARK AT MIDNIGHT, THEY KNEW.”

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

“They knew.” I knew. We here in the George household knew. We had tried to watch as many of the state hearings as possible, conducted by President Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, in an excellent and exemplary manner considering the time pressures and the unbelievable hours they had to have worked, traveled, met with witnesses, etc., all tasks a trial lawyer must somehow manage in many cases, but rarely ever under this kind of time pressure. Now, of course, “America’s Mayor” is the new hate object of the Loon Wing of — well, just about everything—media, Democrats, academia, Congressmen (can I still say that?), Senators, the list goes on to now include the New York court which just suspended Mayor Giuliani in a disgraceful act of partisan vindictiveness.

These few words-”they knew”- so succinctly describe how so many of us felt then and still feel today, in the face of the barrage of ridicule and condescension and sniffery and snark for even daring to consider such heresy, To borrow a word from Douglas Murray’s superb book, The Madness of Crowds, to express these thoughts and doubts about the legitimacy of the election and, ergo, the “Presidency” of Good Ol’ Lunchbucket Joe from Scranton has become “unsayable” in “polite” company. This has been shown to be true even in some venues which hold themselves out to be bastions of free speech for the right and center-right.

JUDGES HAVE FAMILIES TOO.

Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories. They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.

Media & Tech did everything to make things worse. Everything about the election was strange – the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc – but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).

Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously. See 2016 for proof.

Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence. They’ll say, w/good reason: What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?

It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won. Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant. Judges have families, too.

This section of the essay touches upon one of the most disappointing aspects of this entire nightmare, to use as genteel a word as possible to describe how we really felt, as we were, as lawyers who spent their lives being governed by, and championing the glories of, The Rule of Law at turns terribly let down, angered, outraged, bewildered and astonished at the daily, weekly refusal of Courts to even entertain President Trump’s claims. When the US Supreme Court refused to take up the Pennsylvania case—as blatant a violation of the Elections Clause of the US Constitution as one could ever find— we were totally mystified. We were in very good and esteemed company, however, as Justice Thomas and others on the Court expressed the same emotion at the way the majority ran from that controversy.

ARTICLE I, SECTION 4, CLAUSE 1 OF THE CONSTITUTION MAKES IT CRYSTAL CLEAR THAT ELECTIONS IN SEVERAL STATES WERE CONDUCTED UNCONSTITUTIONALLY

Forget the ballot conspiracies. It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.

They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English. But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election. And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules? The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1

b) The press is part of the operation

c) Election rules were changed

d) Big Tech censors opposition

e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged

f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

I have never been accused of, or claimed to, being overly “nuanced” in my approach to the legal problems raised by our cases and, in fact, have been, from time to time, accused of overly simplistic thinking. That said, one of the most disquieting aspects of this entire imbroglio has been to witness the various pretzels many observers turned their thinking into an attempt (successful in the swing states, which is what got us here in the first place) to avoid the actual words of the Constitution of the United States known as The Elections Clause. Here it is and it seems to me to be a model of clarity so plain in its meaning that, to borrow from the TV commercial, “even a caveman can understand it.” (Hope I don’t get “canceled” by the Caveman Caucus!):

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

As the essayist states, “[f]orget the ballot conspiracies”, which may not be resolved until comprehensive historical analyses are written many decades from now, it is a fact that such extremely partisan parties as many of the leading executives in states like Pennsylvania- and especially, and disgracefully, its Supreme Court- simply decided to ignore these few words in our Founding Document and make up their own rules. If this is not unconstitutional rulemaking I may have to admit that age is really taking a toll on my ability to read very short, very simple statements in the English language.

Glenn Greenwald featured this essay on his Substack site and had this to say about the very strange, disorienting, and dangerous times we live in:

As Cooper notes, he does not share all of the perceptions and beliefs he is conveying, although he shares many of them. Instead, based on the recognition that most media outlets are incapable of understanding let alone accurately describing the views of a group of people they view with little more than unmitigated contempt, condescension and scorn, he believes it is imperative that people understand the actual reality of what is motivating so many Trump voters in their views, perception and beliefs — regardless of whether each particular belief is accurate or not.

As Mr. Greenwald is, in my opinion, one of the few remaining journalists left in this bizarre world we find ourselves in, I adopt his description in toto as my conclusion, except to urge that this essay be distributed as widely as possible so that perhaps we can return to some semblance of reasoned dialogue in America.