With deference to Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, and deference to Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Victoria Toensing, Joe diGenova, and the others who have been fighting the good fight to save the American republic from the catastrophic damage a stolen presidential election would wreak, it doesn’t look good.

There are items worthy of optimism. There are court cases winding their way through the system, and there are, here and there, a few victories. There are state legislatures, even among those states whose systems abjectly failed on November 3, in which movements are afoot to decertify the results given claims of deeply flawed and illegally processed balloting.

But at the end of the day, what those of us appalled by the irregularities and highly suspicious manipulation that produced a nonsensical result — an unsellable candidate with no demonstrated appeal who ran a moribund public campaign, had no coattails whatsoever, whose vote was more noticeably isolated to Democrat-controlled large cities than ever before, and yet produced a higher vote total than any in American history — are doing is hoping against hope for some deus ex machina to save us from Bidenlonian Captivity.

Your author is also hoping that something will come along. Joe Biden as the American president in 2021 is every bit the disaster Herbert Hoover was in 1929 or James Buchanan was in 1857. A Biden administration portends catastrophe on fronts economic, technological, geopolitical, cultural and military. We can’t afford him, and we especially can’t afford the people who control him.

And yet the deus ex machina we are continually promised seems to slip away. It didn’t come in the Pennsylvania cases, though it should have. It didn’t come with the “kraken.” It didn’t come with Lin Wood’s Georgia suit. It didn’t come with Texas v. Pennsylvania. And now, it doesn’t appear to have come with the DNI report on foreign meddling in the election the Friday release of which has been scratched.

We’re hurtling toward January 20, and half the voting public will believe that the election is stolen and the republic is finished.

So what does a post-republic look like? Well …

1. Theft by a Thousand Cuts

The latest formerly highly respected American destined to be trashed by our corporate media as a loon and a crank is Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, an old Washington hand well known in economic circles as a trusted adviser to both sides of the aisle. Navarro produced a report Thursday entitled “THE IMMACULATE DECEPTION: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities,” which assembled all the available evidence from witness affidavits in court filings, statistical evidence, and official and other sources to build a matrix of findings in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.

From the report:

From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket. Indeed, the observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to “stuff the ballot box” and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.

Navarro’s formulation was that “This was theft by a thousand cuts across six dimensions and six battleground states rather than any one single ‘silver bullet’ election irregularity.” And he furthermore challenged that “Those journalists, pundits, and political leaders now participating in what has become a Biden Whitewash should acknowledge the six dimensions of election irregularities and conduct the appropriate investigations to determine the truth about the 2020 election. If this is not done before Inauguration Day, we risk putting into power an illegitimate and illegal president lacking the support of a large segment of the American people.”

When you have old hands like Navarro sounding alarm bells about the election, only to be slapped down by entities like Forbes magazine, which attacked the Navarro report as hinging “on debunked allegations that have largely been rejected when raised in court, and one nonpartisan ethics watchdog criticized Navarro for writing it,” and the “nonpartisan ethics watchdog” cited happens to be the far-left Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington (CREW), one of the more shamelessly partisan attack dogs the Democrats have (quoted in the Forbes piece is CREW’s Deputy Director Donald Sherman, a “nonpartisan” former staffer for Elijah Cummings), we no longer have the honest political dialogue a republic needs.

2. Unity, or You’re Gonna Get It

In a republic of laws, no presidential candidate, successful or otherwise, would put himself above the integrity of the process. Biden has blatantly flouted that convention, forming a fraudulent “office of the president-elect” and then demanding unity under his leadership while dozens of cases contesting questionable results were still traveling through the courts. When electors were seated on December 14, those demands began taking on the character of threats.

“In America, politicians don’t take power,” he said during a speech that featured nonstop coughing dismissed by Biden as the product of a cold. “People grant power to them. The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know nothing — not even a pandemic or an abuse of power — can extinguish that flame.”

Considering that the very people he’s trying to settle down quite reasonably believe that the pandemic to which he’s referring was used as a vehicle for polluting America’s electoral system with highly vulnerable mail-in ballots, and their introduction in contravention to state election law laid down by state legislators as provided for in the Electors Clause of Article II of the Constitution was the very definition of an abuse of power by secretaries of state, governors, and courts in the disputed states, there could have been no more in-your-face statement from Biden’s mouth.

“Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy, even if we find those results hard to accept,” he went on to say. “That’s the duty owed to the people, to our constitution, to our history. You know, in this battle for the soul of America democracy prevailed. We the people voted. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact.”

If you don’t accept the results of this election, you’re apparently in dereliction of your duty as a citizen. Considering that immediately following the announcement of Biden as the winner of the election a gaggle of leftists inspired by AOC began flogging something called the Trump Accountability Project, which sought to ruin the professional and personal lives of people who had worked for the president, before a public backlash shot that idea down, it isn’t hard to see what’s coming for those who don’t meet Joe Biden’s standard of “duty.”

That standard, by the way, doesn’t apply to the people who refused to accept the 2016 election, as many of them, for example Neera Tanden and Jennifer Granholm, are slated for cabinet jobs in a Biden administration.

3. Everything Smells Like China

It isn’t necessary to recount the Eric Swalwell story, or how a Chinese spy named Fang Fang apparently plied him with sexual favors in order to compromise him as a member of the House Intelligence Committee. Axios did the work on Swalwell; in a functional and viable republic he would have resigned from public life in disgrace, never again to have his name mentioned in polite company. The word “treason” would be somewhat appropriate to bandy about in connection with his scandal, particularly in light of the Chinese Communist infiltration of our ruling class.

That infiltration is so pervasive the Chinese are actually bragging about it. By now you’ve surely seen the video of the vice dean of the School of International Relations at Beijing’s Renmin University Di Dongsheng, speaking to a live audience on a television broadcast, claiming that the Chicoms have had fixers on Wall Street taking care of all their American problems since the 1970s. The professor also confirmed, from the ChiCom end, everything said about Hunter Biden’s Chinese dealings.

But even without our national Di Dongsheng moment the level of nonchalance toward the Chinese infiltration apparent in our political class was inescapable. Consider House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reaction when a group of House Republicans questioned Swalwell’s involvement on the Intelligence Committee. “I don’t have any concern about Mr. Swalwell,” was her response.

In a functional republic, a statement like that would mark Pelosi as a threat to national security for having taken so dismissive a position toward foreign intelligence services compromising members of her intelligence committee. But we are in a post-republic, in which it’s fair to question whether there are any California Democrats who are not compromised as Swalwell is. But give Pelosi some credit; so far she hasn’t awarded Swalwell a congressional medal for his alleged Fang Fang bang-bang, as former DNC press flack Brad Woodhouse suggested.

Of course, the single most China-compromised politician in America is Joe Biden. After helping to make him our “president-elect,” the corporate media is now willing to report on that fact. It almost feels like our elites, even some who formerly rebelled, feel safe to admit that they’re kowtowing to China and so should we.

4. A Hypocracy of Hypocrisy

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is the latest member of our “do as I say, not as I do” COVIDcrats who impose restrictions and mandates on the plebes with no intention of following them herself. Raimondo, just four days after demanding her subjects, er, constituents stay home, was photographed attending a wine and paint event at a Providence bar.

No mask on. Of course. Right after tweeting, “Please, stay home except for essential activities & wear a mask anytime you’re with people you don’t live with.”

A functional republic would have shot down most of these COVID restrictions from the very beginning, or at least once it was patently obvious they do more harm than good. But the cowardice of the American judiciary in failing, outside of a few exceptions, to pull the ruling class off the necks of the public has emboldened the Gavin Newsoms and Gretchen Whitmers of the world to make a mockery of American civil rights amid the spread, which they cannot control, of a virus with a 99.8 percent survival rate.

Not only are they hypocrites. They’re members of our new Hypocracy — government by the largest hypocrites available. The more false sanctimony, the higher the political reward.

5. What Happens Next?

A warning: anything goes in a post-republic. When the guardrails are taken down, and when the rules agreed on for a quarter of a millennium are thrown in the garbage, the opponents of the old-fashioned racist, sexist, patriarchal, homophobic, and otherwise-mean America as founded might well be disappointed to find that they don’t actually get to dictate the terms of the post-republic.

Does anyone think Joe Biden will get to reshape America in the months before he himself is reshaped out of the White House? You would have to be naive to believe that. Biden isn’t in control of anything. Does anyone believe Kamala Harris is up to the job as Biden’s successor? And does anyone believe that the American people will stand for what’s coming?

Oh, sure, you say, but the folks are too comfortable and too soft. They lack the bite to make any real trouble.

This might be true today. But let Biden destroy 10 million energy jobs. Let him waste American lives in a pointless war in some faraway part of the world as the globalist gang in Washington is addicted to doing, while China exercises its strategic will on, say, Taiwan. Let his “100 days to beat COVID” linger as “15 days to flatten the curve” has, with the attendant disaster among small businesses across America. Let the cultural Marxist aggressions step even further into transgender insanity and mandatory struggle sessions around “white privilege.” Let all the reasons a Joe Biden presidency is so dangerous begin to manifest themselves.

That’s when you see the real effects of the post-republic. Because those are not pretty. From Rome to Germany to Chile, history shows us that the post-republic is won by those willing to do whatever it takes to win the post-republic.

And everything our ruling class is doing and has done has been based on perverting our current rules, which disappear when the public stops believing in them.

Steal an election, and you break the republic. What comes after may break you.