“Charlie, what should I do?”

It’s a question I get asked a lot, in one form or another. People are upset and worried about the decline of America and want to know how they can hold back the decay, or help carry America back to greatness. But they feel overwhelmed and dispirited by the scale of the problem

I make a lot of recommendations: Get out and actually engage with local politics at the school board and city council. Volunteer for candidates and volunteer on their behalf. Be an engaged citizen and not just a passive consumer of TV news and talk radio.

But these days, I’m giving another piece of advice: Become a paying subscriber to X, Elon Musk’s rebranded version of the old Twitter.

I’m not normally one to hawk a product, unless it’s an ad on my radio show. And it definitely feels weird to suggest giving money to one of the world’s richest men, who isn’t even publicly a conservative.

But I really believe it. A year ago, I predicted that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter might be the most momentous financial transaction since the Louisiana Purchase, and events have been bearing that prediction out. Almost overnight, Musk turned out the hundreds of censors and woke scolds who ran Twitter, and reinvented it as a true free speech venue. He unbanned thousands of people silenced for their views. He gave a haven and a platform for Tucker Carlson after he was so unceremoniously booted from Fox News. 

And ever since Musk’s check cleared, it’s as though a tidal shift has arrived in American politics. In my lifetime, the trend has been for the GOP to, over time, lose pretty much every “culture war” issue, and it looked like the push to normalize transgenderism would just be the latest such defeat. Not anymore. The latest polling shows that Americans are more likely to oppose transgender ideology, and to think that there are only two genders, than they were two years ago. I am firmly convinced that the ability to tell the whole truth about transgenderism on Twitter is a key reason for this breakthrough.

Before Musk’s purchase, every conservative boycott effort had been an embarrassing failure. This year, conservative backlash against Bud Light and Targets has caused serious financial harm to the targeted companies, and put the fear of God into hundreds of other companies. 

And now, in just the last few days, we have Democrat megadonor Bill Ackman’s stunning denunciation of Harvard University, not just for tolerating anti-Semitism, but for its long history of anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination. While the immediate cause of Ackman’s shift in views is Hamas’s horrific attack out of Gaza two months ago, I firmly believe the path was paved by a year of authentic, freewheeling discussion on Twitter, where it is finally acceptable to publicly dissent from left-wing orthodoxy on the major issues of the day.

But the best proof of all for why Musk’s platform matters is the maniacal drive by the left to crush it. For a year, the left and its censorship organs like the ADL have done everything their power to either starve X of ads, or else to force Musk to submit to a new censorship regime in return for their return. Musk, heroically, has refused to give in, in the bluntest possible terms.

But even the world’s richest man can run X at a loss forever. If the company is losing billions of dollars, he will eventually be forced to sell it, or go bankrupt, or surrender to his enemies.

And that’s where we come in. There are three premium subscription levels at X, ranging from $3 to $16 per month. 

Do you care about the future of this country and its constitutional liberties? Do you want America to be a free republic and not a dystopian global free trade zone? Then consider drinking one less Starbucks a month, and using it to buy an X subscription.

Is it because it offers an exceptional service? Honestly, I don’t even know. That’s besides the point. The chief service of Twitter is that it exists, allowing information and ideas to flow uncensored, uncontrolled, and unconstrained. Is Musk right on everything? Not at all. Doesn’t matter. This fight is bigger than any one billionaire.

Should you have to pay for a constitutional right? Of course not. But should you be willing to pay in order to protect those rights? Absolutely. 

Two stories out of California in a single weekend do everything to show the rot at the heart of the left’s ideological vision.

If you’ve had the misfortune to visit downtown Los Angeles any time in the past half-decade, you know how repulsive it has become. Skid Row was always bad, but now the homeless camps sprawl for miles, spreading like a fungal disease, ruining the city wherever they go. LA County now has an estimated 75,000 homeless people – if they were their own city, they’d be larger than any city in Delaware, Vermont, or Wyoming. 

Thanks to the state’s radical left judges and some old-fashioned inaction by the monolithically Democratic government, nothing was ever done about LA’s countless camps. And over the weekend, the bill came due: A huge fire broke out underneath the I-10 freeway running through the heart of Los Angeles. 

Thanks to the blaze, the I-10, which normally handles more than 300,000 cars a day, is closed indefinitely. It may literally be months before the problem is remedied. The impact to LA’s economy and the day-to-day lives of citizens will be enormous.

What caused the fire? City officials have avoided saying much, but locals know the truth already: The vast majority of fires in downtown Los Angeles are set by the homeless, for their own toxic and self-destructive reasons. In all likelihood, if LA had cleaned up its homeless camps, its highway would be intact, and everyone’s lives would be better.

But that would have required caring about ordinary citizens, and California liberals emphatically do not.

What do they care about? Impressing foreign dictators. Twenty-one world leaders and as many as 30,000 other visitors are in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, and the most high-profile of all them is Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. 

San Francisco has been covered in tents, needles, and human excrement for years and years. Businesses have failed because the city refuses to do anything about rampant shoplifting and smash and grab robberies, and because the drugged-out zombies who inhabit the streets have wrecked the commercial viability of entire neighborhoods. But until this week, San Francisco steadfastly refused to do anything.

But with Xi about to arrive, the city abruptly got its act together. Police swept the streets to round up bums and get them into housing, jails, or at the least somewhere else. The tents vanished. The streets were cleaned for perhaps the first time since the Dirty Harry movies were new.

🇺🇸 Chinese President Xi Jinping's upcoming visit to San Francisco has forced the local Democrat-led government to "clean house" and finally do something about the city's massive homelessness, according to critics. pic.twitter.com/nabtK3doth

— W i z a r d S X (@WizardSX0) November 13, 2023

Gov. Gavin Newsome was remarkably honest about the reasoning: It’s not worth cleaning up the city for the residents, but “when you have people over [like, say, a murderous dictator], you are gonna clean up.”

Whether it’s homelessness, or crime, or failing schools, or all the other problems that plague blue cities, the reality is never that it’s hard to solve the problem. Almost every problem of urban decay has a straightforward fix that has been known for decades if not centuries. Instead, the problem is entirely one of willpower: The left’s leaders don’t see improving the lives of ordinary people as a priority. And so, they don’t.

Many have pointed out that leftism is a secular religion, a god for the godless. One of the many ways this is true is the left’s love of prophecy. Marxism isn’t just an economic theory, but also a prophecy: Karl Marx preached the doctrine of “historical materialism,” claiming that economic and social forces could be understood just like a physics equation, and could be used to predict the future. The Bolsheviks who destroyed Russia and the Maoists who wrecked China believed that their victories were not just desirable, but a scientific certainty on par with gravity.

Today’s left doesn’t talk much about historical materialism, but they have their own off-brand prophecy: Demographics, they believe, make the left’s triumph inevitable.

For half a century, the left has exploited corporate America’s taste for cheap labor to pump America with immigrants from around the world. This mass immigration has totally betrayed the Democrats’ former New Deal base, but the party’s elites believed this short-term pain was worth the long-term political gain: Over time, they told themselves, they were building a permanent Democrat majority.

“We can replace them,” New York Times writer Michelle Goldberg boasted in 2018. “An embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority.” One book boasted that in the future America, “Brown is the New White.”

In Democratic eschatology, this “new American majority” of non-whites will also mean a permanent Democrat majority. In the future, minorities will be more than half the vote, and they will vote monolithically Democrat, and that will be it: One party rule for the rest of time. It’s science.

Not so fast, it turns out.

Like a thunderclap, The New York Times of all places has come out to announce that the Democrat “permanent majority” is vanishing by the second. According to a new poll the paper conducted, Donald Trump is leading or tied with Joe Biden in five out of six swing states that Biden carried in 2020.

That’s the headline, but what’s far more compelling is how Trump is leading Biden in the poll. It’s not because Trump is maximizing his share of the shrinking white vote. It’s because non-white voters, the group that Democrats assumed they could win effortlessly for all time, are abandoning Joe Biden in droves. In the six states the Times surveyed, Biden’s lead with Hispanic voters has fallen into the single digits. Among black voters, Trump is getting 22 percent – more than five times what John McCain garnered in 2008. Among voters under 30, Biden has a lead of exactly one point…when he carried that group by 24 in 2020.

Do I fully believe that poll? Not necessarily. I find it very hard to believe that any Republican would manage a statistical tie with voters under 30. But that’s what’s so incredible about this poll: Even if the truth is only half as devastating as the results indicate, it would be a disaster for Democrats. And they know it. Outlets like Axios are spinning this as “Biden’s race problem.” But it’s not Biden’s problem. It’s the Democrats’.

Why the abrupt turnaround? That’s easy to answer, at least. The left spent four years positioning themselves as the serious “expert” alternative to a Trump clown show. But now, voters have seen the truth: Whatever Trump’s rough edges, he delivered a better economy, a more secure border, a successful foreign policy, and more law and order. The defining strain of modern liberalism, “wokeness,” is increasingly seen as the shrill, judgmental, anti-human, anti-civilization monstrosity that it is. And at the top of everything is Joe Biden, so feeble he can barely tell where he is. 

But it goes even deeper than that. Democrats believed their victory was so inevitable, that they went onto autopilot. They assumed race baiting alone was enough to win, no matter how badly they mismanaged the country.

Thirty years ago, the Soviet bloc collapsed. It turns out that “historical materialism” was a lie, socialism doesn’t work, and Marxism was a fraud. Now, the left is learning that its “permanent Democrat majority” prophecy is a lie as well.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Mike Johnson’s sudden rise from backbencher to Speaker of the House took Washington by surprise. Many so-called “insiders” didn’t even know who he was, let alone what makes him tick.

But after a pause to collect itself, official Washington has settled on the narrative it will use to tear down the new Speaker: Mike Johnson is a Christian nationalist!

“He is … a right-wing, white evangelical Christian nationalist,” historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez told Politico. 

“Mike Johnson’s Christian nationalist track record isn’t a mystery — it’s a tragedy.” So said MSNBC columnist Sarah Posner. “Mike Johnson’s Ties to Christian Nationalism Revealed” is the Newsweek headline.

I know that some of my fans would happily call themselves “Christian nationalists.” Others might reject the term, if only because they aren’t Christians themselves. But we don’t need to get into the weeds of defining what Christian nationalism is, or whether Mike Johnson is one. Instead, what matters is what the media means when they call him one, and what their goal is in doing so.

And that, at least, is easy to figure out. The media are calling Mike Johnson a “Christian nationalist” to frighten people, to make the masses think he is a scary extremist who will implement fascism, theocracy, or something else. Some are quite blunt about this. Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, overtly called Mike Johnson a “Christo-fascist” who would annihilate the American republic.

Here’s the truth: Mike Johnson is not radical. The views that are central to his belief system are those that have guided America for hundreds of years, and which were taken for granted by America’s greatest leaders. 

Johnson believes that a divine entity, God, created the universe and all that resides in it (Genesis 1:1). Just as important, he knows that he is not God. He believes that human beings are naturally flawed and sinful, therefore power should be decentralized – just as Christians are told in Genesis 3:22, Psalms 51:5, or Romans 5:12–21.

He believes that we should not judge people based on the color of their skin, and instead seek to win over their soul and increase the population of heaven (Galatians 3:28). He believes that we should not administer justice based on feelings or victim status. We should favor neither the rich nor the poor, neither the powerful nor the powerless (Leviticus 19:15).

Mike Johnson believes that marriage is between one man and one woman, like Christ taught in Matthew 19:4–6 and like the Western world believed for nearly two thousand years. 

Mike Johnson says that his faith and belief in God guide his decision-making, which we ought to see as a good thing – since the alternative would be that he is a hypocrite and a fraud (no doubt, Washington would find him more relatable if he was).

Mike Johnson believes what nearly every Founding Father believed. Nothing about that is insane, fringe, or scary. This is what built the entire world you live in. His worldview is the basis of our entire civilization, which is exactly why the media is trying to discredit and destroy it.

Mike Johnson would be in full agreement with John Adams, who wrote that America’s Constitution could only succeed with a “moral and religious people.” He would get along perfectly with George Washington, whose farewell address warned that American prosperity would only continue if it remained in alignment with Christian principles.

If Mike Johnson is a “Christian nationalist,” then so were all of America’s greatest presidents and all of her Founding Fathers.  If Mike Johnson is beyond the pale, then all of them are beyond the pale too. And that, of course, is the point. Christian tradition is a rebuke to the Left’s goal of remaking society from the ground up. Christian humility undermines the Left’s totalitarian vision for government. A “biblical worldview” like Johnson’s is incompatible with a leftist one – and the left knows it.

Because ultimately, what frightens the left isn’t Mike Johnson, or “Christian nationalism.” It’s the belief in God itself.

Modern wars are not just fought with bombs and bullets. They are fought with tweets, viral videos, and PR campaigns. 

Israel is still one of the world’s best at the first kind of war. But at the second, they are losing badly. And that’s a concern for all Americans, regardless of faith background, who feel attached to Israel and support its continued existence as a bastion of Western civilization in a barbarous Middle East. 

The polling is clear: Young people in America are turning against Israel. Among Americans 65 or older, 81% believe Israel’s response to Hamas is “fully justified.” Among those aged 18-34, just 27% think so. It’s one of the single-largest age gaps for any issue in politics. It’s far larger than the age gap on abortion, transgenderism, or even gay marriage.

What happened? As I explained in my show Monday, it’s a lot of things. Thanks to 60 years of mass immigration, more Americans come from countries and societies sympathetic to Palestinians, rather than the Jewish people. Even among native-born Americans, almost all young Americans attend schools that teach the core tenets of “critical theory”: That the world consists of oppressors and oppressed, that success is zero sum and that if one group of people has nice things, it can only be because they took it from those weaker and less fortunate. When this worldview is pushed constantly, it’s only natural that they’d end up learning to dislike Israel: Israel is rich, while Palestine is poor and dangerous. The idea that this is due to good choices and values inside Israel, compared to poor choices and values among the Palestinians, is almost unthinkable to the mind of a modern young person, and sadly it’s a mindset popular even with many who lean conservative. 

But especially on the right, there are many other factors responsible for falling sympathy toward Israel. Sadly, not all young conservatives are Christian or Jewish, so they aren’t sold on Biblical arguments for supporting Israel. Even more important, though, is America’s disastrous 20 years of wars in the Middle East, and the relentless efforts of Washington neocons to launch even more. A 25-year-old conservative has no memory of America winning a war. They only know about the immense failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. They see warhawks Lindsey Graham agitating for regime change in both Syria and Iran – and very often, those same warmongers present military adventures as a way to show support to Israel.

If Lindsey Graham is the loudest public supporter of Israel, why should we be surprised if young people support them less?

There are other unforced errors happening. When an Israeli strike damaged the Church of St. Porphyrios in Gaza and killed several civilians, many Christians I knew were appalled, and Israel-haters immediately exploited the story. Israeli spokesmen should have responded immediately, expressing remorse for the lost civilian lives, lamenting the damage to a historic place of worship, and explaining why they had made the strike. I was happy when an IDF spokesman responded to my concerns about the damage to St. Porphyrios Church in Gaza. But it shouldn’t have taken a tweet from me, especially when other Israeli social media accounts have been picking fights with celebrities. 

The truth is, too many people have taken the base’s support of Israel for granted. Just like IDF intelligence got complacent about the threat from Hamas, Israel’s advocates have grown lazy about the arguments they need to make to keep international support strong. It shouldn’t be hard to win a PR war against savages who go door to door murdering babies, and it’s perfectly possible to support Israel without supporting endless foreign wars. In fact, since supporting Israel requires America remaining strong, staying out of wars is one of the best ways to keep backing them. 

The arguments are easy to make. But we need people prepared to actually make them, instead of ignoring the problem, or worse, denouncing concerns as motivated by anti-Semitism.

If and when Israel makes a ground incursion into Gaza, hostile press attention will be ten times greater than it is now. The time to prepare is now.

It was a pretty strange weekend for me, to say the least.

On Friday, I endured many of the same attacks I’ve endured for nearly a decade as the leader of Turning Point USA. Radicals of every stripe lashed out and complained that I was a “Jewish shill,” “Israel-firster,” and other less printable things, all because of my position supporting Israel’s anti-Hamas after the worst terror attack in Israel’s long, often tragic history.

Then, I put my phone away, as I always do from Friday night through Saturday night as part of my personal observance of Shabbat. When I picked up my phone on Saturday night, a very different kind of insult was being hurled at me.

Now, instead of an Israel-firster, I was an anti-Semite! Repugnant people who ought to know better made these claims based only on a single fact: That I have criticized Israel’s government in the wake of the Hamas attacks, and I have opposed any direct U.S. involvement in Israel’s military response. On top of that single fact, they added a mountain of lies and innuendo. They blamed me for the ideas and words of other people, who I don’t agree with. They assumed a malicious hidden agenda where they had no reason to suspect one.

Here’s the truth. Those critics from last week are right, in one sense: It’s hard to find a Christian American who is more sympathetic to Israel and the Jewish people than I am. I have a massive emotional connection to the Holy Land and to the State of Israel as a guardian of the holy places of Christianity. I feel a great affinity for the Israeli people as an embattled civilization under perpetual siege from the forces of radicalism and hate.

But at the same point, I know who I am. I am not an Israeli. I am an American, and America always comes first. Supporting Israel’s war against Gaza doesn’t mean that I support sacrificing America’s long-term wellbeing to support it. I don’t want American boots on the ground, because this is not not America’s war. America has fought a lot of wars in the past thirty years, and almost none of them have been worth it in the end. At this point, we are more overstretched than ever. Our national debt is around 150% of GDP. Our munitions stocks are depleted from the last war Washington bankrolled, in Ukraine. We have more reason than ever to worry about a Chinese show of force over Taiwan.

It’s clear that for a lot of the right, the events of the past week have been deeply upsetting, and not just because of the appalling loss of human life. Rather, as America’s own institutions have decayed, as our own military has been diverted into pursuing Joe Biden’s domestic policy goals, many conservatives place vicarious hope in Israel as a “serious” country. In America, we have an open border with Planet Earth, and pretend nothing is wrong. Israel can’t afford that illusion – they know that if their border disappeared, their country would disappear with it. In America, our armed forces have been repurposed as a tool of Joe Biden’s domestic policy, promoting transgenderism, feminism, and mass vaccination. Israel cannot afford such a waste. To conservatives, Israel is the place where the system works, where the army is allowed to protect the country, where threats are dealt with rather than appeased.

The events of a week ago were a devastating shock to that assumption. For some people, questioning Israel in the wake of Hamas’s attack feels like an ideological offense, even if none of them can really articulate why.

But they’re wrong. It’s not “anti-Semitic” to demand answers. Just the opposite, in fact. I want the best for Israel and for the Jewish people. I want them to have the best government and military possible, and I want them to live in peace and security. I want to know the truth: How was a government that is supposed to be on perpetual alert caught so badly unprepared? Why did it take six hours to even launch a basic ground counterattack against Hamas’s terrorist marauders? Why did some Israelis wait twenty hours to be rescued? And of course: How was this allowed to happen, given the billions of dollars in military, technological, and intelligence assistance America offers to Israel every single year?

These are times where nuance is shunned in America. I’m sometimes guilty of that myself. But especially in times of high drama, it is critical that we use our brains and seek the truth, instead of wildly hurling abuse and epithets that mean nothing.

What do the horrific events in Israel have to do with America? Well, a lot, it turns out. 

Millions of American Jews have friends and family in Israel. Millions of American Christians feel affinity for the Jewish people as the forebears of their own faith, and for Israel as the guardian of the holy sites of Christianity. Millions of Americans of all faiths sympathize with the Israeli people as victims of terrorism and as a force of civilization battling against barbarians.

But there’s more to it than that: The bloodbath emanating out of Gaza is a warning of what awaits America if we don’t start to care about who we let into our own country.

The bloodthirsty killers of Hamas infiltrate Israel in a dozen different ways. They smashed barriers with bulldozers. They came in via the sea in motorboats. They flew in on small gliders. Some may have infiltrated using tunnels. Some may have snuck in long ago as sleeper cells.

Hamas had to use these complex methods because it’s hard to get into Israel. They have a fence around Gaza and they use soldiers, not just police, to man it.

Now, ask yourself, if Hamas or anybody else wanted to get into America, to torture and rape and kill our people, what stops them? 

You know the answer: Absolutely nothing. America is not a hard country to gain access to. President Trump worked hard to build a wall, but it wasn’t finished when he left office, and just to make sure that ever finishing it will be as hard as possible, Joe Biden sold off the materials at a discount of more than 90 percent. In 2022, 100 people on the US terror watchlist were caught crossing the US-Mexico border. So far this year, it’s 160. That’s the ones who were caught, not the ones who simply snuck through unseen.

But it’s worse than that. America isn’t just exposed to possible terrorist incursions through neglect. We actively welcome people whose cultures are incompatible with our own, people whose “values” include our own destruction. 

We’re seeing the consequences of our laissez-faire attitude in countless U.S. cities. Twenty-two years ago, the mass murder of innocent people in 9/11 filled us with disgust and revulsion. Now, after last Saturday, there are dozens of rallies by people who support Hamas. There have been pro-Hamas rallies in New York, in Atlanta, and in San Diego. A lawmaker in Colorado refused to condemn Hamas on camera. They support people whose idea of warfare is to go door-to-door murdering children and the elderly. They support rapists and monsters who call up their victims’ family members to share videos of them being tortured to death. They openly support the use of the worst atrocities imaginable in order to help a genocidal terrorist group triumph over the only true democracy in the Middle East.

There ought to be a sincere question going through our minds right now: Why are people like this in America? How did our country go so far astray that we willfully let in people who would cheer on rapists and childkillers?

The people marching in support of Hamas are not illegal immigrants, for the most part. But they’re a product of the same attitude that gave us so many illegals. They’re here because of the open borders death cult, the idea that everyone in the world has a right to be in America, the idea that everyone deserves to live in a rich First World country, except for the children of those who built that first world country. 

One year ago, about 8,000 people from the country of Mauritania lived in the entire U.S. Then, just from March through June of this year, another 8,500 people came here. They all follow the same process: They fly into Nicaragua, which they can enter by simply purchasing a visa upon arrival. Then, they pay smugglers to take them up to the U.S.-Mexico border. When they get there, they just walk across, claim “asylum,” and that’s that. As long as you say the right words about your home country, you are allowed to wait in America until your claim is processed. By the way, these Mauritarians are learning this plan for getting into America by watching TikTok videos made by those who are already here. 

So, once you get asylum, how long will it take to process your claim? Years, it turns out. In fact, it can take decades. Right now, in New York City, migrants claiming asylum are being given court dates in 2033. That’s not a mistake; they’re being told their court date is a decade away. And that’s just their initial court date! The rest of the process typically takes several years after that.

That is not an immigration system. It’s open borders in drag. 

That means that America will, over time, have a lot more Mauritanians, and will resemble Mauritania a little bit more with each day. Well, what does that mean? Mauritania only criminalized slavery about 15 years ago. That ban is largely not enforced. It’s also a country where fundamentalist Islam is widespread. So, do we want America to be a country that has more people who practice fundamentalist Islam and who are used to practicing illegal slavery?

Whatever we think the answer to that question is, the answer of our leaders is “Yes, bring in as many as possible.”

Becoming a serious country again will mean becoming serious about who we let into this country, the same way a family is serious about who they let into their home, or a club is serious about who they admit as a member. And if we don’t, we shouldn’t be surprised if we wake up to find that those who support beheading children live next door.

Need to know what the Biden regime’s lawfare strategy for America looks like? Look no further than the case, or lack thereof, against IRS consultant Charles Littlejohn.

“Who?” you might ask. Between the House continuing resolution, Ukraine, Trump’s civil trial, and more, it was an easy story to miss, even though it deserves to be a big deal: According to DOJ prosecutors, Littlejohn stole the tax returns of one specific but unnamed “high-ranking government official,” as well as the returns of thousands of other wealthy Americans, and then leaked the information to two unnamed media organizations.

It doesn’t take a genius intellect to piece together what Littlejohn actually did: If prosecutors are correct, he stole Donald Trump’s tax returns and gave them to The New York Times, then for good measure gave thousands of other rich Americans’ tax information to left-wing investigative outlet Pro Publica.

These documents were used to produce sweeping, invasive profiles of Trump and many other ultra-rich Americans, all with the calculated ideological goal of sabotaging Trump’s political movement and furthering the left’s goals of widespread wealth confiscation. 

So, what kind of consequences is Littlejohn facing? Only this: A single count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns, with a maximum sentence of five years if convicted. 

One single count, in a country where you apparently can’t make a tweet about a TV show you’re watching without advancing a felonious conspiracy.

Even if Littlejohn doesn’t manage to beat this lone charge outright, it’s possible that even if convicted he’ll walk away with no jail time at all.

For the sake of comparison: Douglas Mackey, still unsentenced, faces a maximum of ten years in prison for the “illegal” anti-Hillary Clinton meme he posted in 2016. At least eight January 6 defendants have received sentences of ten years or more. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio got 22 years, despite not being in Washington for January 6. Across the four indictments brought against him by Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith, Donald Trump is facing 91 different criminal charges with a maximum prison sentence of 717 (and a half!) years in prison. 

I’ll be frank: If Littlejohn is guilty, then what he did is far more damaging to “our democracy” than anything that happened on January 6. The January 6 crowd caused some physical damage to the Capitol and sent the MSNBC crowd into hyperventilating hysterics. Littlejohn attacked the basic trustworthiness of our own government.

The very premise of the American experiment is “equal protection of the laws.” Few things violate that more flagrantly than government employees abusing their office to steal private information from their political enemies and giving it to the press. It’s one thing for Americans to lie on their taxes because they want to pay less. Now, thanks to Littlejohn, they have another reason: To prevent a thieving government from making up the rules as it goes to harass and terrorize them.

If private tax information can’t be protected by our government, what else is up for grabs? Your medical records? Private legal cases? 

This isn’t a petty paperwork violation (if it was, no doubt Jack Smith would find a way for it to carry a 20-year sentence). This is a threat to the entire American system of government. And for that, Charles Littlejohn faces five years.

This is what lawfare looks like in a nutshell. It’s not just concocting outlandish sentences and entirely made-up crimes to charge one’s enemies with. It’s also things like this: Undercharging the flagrant crimes of one’s own side, so that they get away with minimal punishment – or often, no punishment at all.

Ignore The Polls – Even When You Like Them

It’s one of the most electric polls any of us have ever seen: 

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Donald Trump beating Joe Biden in a rematch, 52 percent to 42 percent. Okay, “beating” is the wrong word there. “Destroying” is more appropriate. In 2016, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2 percent, but won the Electoral College by almost 60. If Trump were to smash Biden by almost double digits, that wouldn’t be a victory: It would be a landslide like we haven’t had in more than forty years. Trump wouldn’t just win Michigan and Pennsylvania again. He’d win Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire. Heck, he might win New Jersey. 

There are more gems inside the poll. Biden’s approval is at just 37 percent, with him deep underwater in his handling of every major issue. The poll shows Biden winning non-white voters by nine points, which would represent a cataclysmic collapse among the base Democrats have staked their entire political future on. Among voters under 35, the poll gives Trump a twenty-point lead.

It’s a fun poll. It’s enjoyable to see the left sweat. 

But I don’t believe it. In fact, the Post’s poll is such an outlier that I have to assume there is something sinister to it, some kind of hidden agenda. This poll, in a word, is a trap. 

Do I think Joe Biden deserves to lose in a landslide? Absolutely. Do I think he will? Sadly, I don’t.

Look, I’ve been running Turning Point for more than a decade now. I’ve visited dozens of campuses. I’ve spoken to thousands of sympathetic young people, and debated countless hostile ones. I know there are millions of young people who support our cause, and I think Turning Point is helping to increase that number.

But I’m also not delusional: There is no way that Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by 15 points among young people. There just isn’t. That’s not the country we live in. If it was, the Democrat Party would be dead and buried 

So why does this poll exist? One of the most obvious reasons: Democrats know they have a disaster looming with Joe Biden at the helm, and the party’s wiser operatives want him to quit now, before he (or worse, Kamala) leads them into disaster. Accurate polls showing a dead heat won’t force Biden out, but maybe a poll showing him totally collapsing will.

But another reason for a poll like this? Manipulating the right into complacency. Sadly, this is far too easy.

Conservatives have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections. But far too often, the conservative voters and donors I meet simply assume we will coast to a landslide in the next race. Conveniently, this is the worldview that lets them be lazy: Why do the hard work of mobilizing voters if we can win on autopilot? Then, after another year of disappointing results, these same people will complain to me that the only explanation is fraud! Maybe fraud played a role – but fraud only succeeds thanks to our own shortcomings as well. 

I’ve always told people to behave like we’re ten points down, no matter what. If we always assume the worst, and prepare for the worst, then we’ll be boosted by unexpected success, instead of being embarrassed by unexpected failure.

At this time a year from now, the press will be barraging us with polls showing Trump down big against Biden, or Gavin Newsom, or whatever other warm body Democrats shove atop their ticket. It will be our job to ignore those polls as the demoralizing propaganda they are. But if we are smart enough to ignore the bad polls, then we shouldn’t be tricked by the good ones either.

One hundred and ten years ago, Woodrow Wilson took office after winning the 1912 presidential election. His victory was something of a fluke – William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote, allowing Wilson to win with a mere 42% plurality. But despite the fluky nature of his win, no presidential race has proven more important to American history. 

Ever since Wilson took office, the story of America has been one of the steady growth of centralized, unelected power. America shifted from having an elected government to having a permanent one. Within just a few years, we had a Federal Reserve, an income tax, and forerunners of the FBI. We went from a government of citizens to one of bureaucrats. Today, the so-called “Deep State” of regulators, administrators, and intelligence agents is effectively a fourth branch of government. Often, they’re basically the only branch of government. It grows with almost every administration, Democrat or Republican. They’re the ones who spied on Donald Trump. They’re the ones who toppled Richard Nixon. They might even be the ones who killed JFK. 

Whatever our surface-level political battles are – over foreign wars, the border, trans bathrooms, you name it – defanging this unelected, unchecked, unfathomably arrogant Washington super-government must be a central long-term goal of any political movement claiming to be conservative or pro-freedom. 

And Saturday, September 30, we have what could be a 110-year moment to turn back this regime.

The federal government needs to pass a short-term funding bill by Sept. 30 or there will be a government shutdown. The Biden Administration is asking that in addition to the normal funding of that bill, that Congress add another $44 billion on top of that in “emergency” spending, including $16 billion for disaster recovery and  $24 billion for Ukraine (note which of those numbers is larger).

There have been a lot of funding showdowns between Democrats and Republicans over the years. There was a government shutdown under Obama over ObamaCare. There was a shutdown under Trump over the border wall. We had another big budget clash just a few months ago. 

What makes this showdown different isn’t its size. It’s two words: Jack Smith. The Biden regime, at this moment, is using an agent of the Deep State, permanent Washington, to try and throw its top political rival in prison.This bears repeating – America’s chief executive, using laws that have never been used in the manner they currently are, is trying to send to prison the man who is currently beating him in many polls for the 2024 election. It’s trying to send people who merely participated in his legal challenges 4 years ago to prison. It’s already convicted a man of a felony for making anti-Hillary Clinton memes seven years ago. 

America has had bad policies before. It’s embarked on dumb wars, it’s had corrupt officials, and it’s wasted unfathomable amounts of money. But we have never had one of our political factions attempt to criminalize the entire enemy faction.

When this happens in Third World dumpsters, we call it what it is: Dictatorship, tyranny, an assault on “democracy.” 

This is not standard politics. This is a crisis. In a crisis, we should act differently than we normally do. We’ve toppled foreign governments for less than this. The least we can do, then, is stop funding this one.

Dozens of elected Republicans have accurately called this summer’s wave of indictments against Trump an assault on our republic. Well, time to act like it. The message should be narrow, surgical, and clear: No funding, for anything Biden wants, until Jack Smith’s inquisition is called off. For as long as Smith continues targeting Biden’s rival, the country is in a de facto state of emergency, and no other business can be justified. Period. End of story. 

The Leviathan has advanced unchecked for more than a century. It’s time to deal them a real defeat.

No happy talk. No “clean” resolutions. No playing “not to lose.” It’s time to try and win the 110-year war.