Dan Gelernter makes the case.

Here’s my question to the January 6 committee: If Trump made a call for violence on January 6, how could I possibly have missed it? I was glued to the TV all day. I watched Trump’s speech; I hung on every word. I recognized it as a pivotal moment in American history: We were about to certify an unelected, illegitimate president. It was an impending catastrophe that only the boldest possible action could have prevented.

If Trump had called out to the nation in his January 6 speech—if he had said, “We must stop this, come to Washington with your guns!”—millions of Americans would have come. The response would have been massive and overwhelming. You can bet your boots that Ashli Babbitt would not have been the only person shot and killed that day.

Trump easily—easily—could have started a civil war. He had only to make the call. Millions would have answered it. America was watching and waiting. But Trump never made that call, and Washington knows damn well he didn’t.

Which is why he is where he is today, bringing the entire country along for the ride. He had overwhelming support, the weight of numbers on his side, a willing and available counterrevolutionary force with more guns than every branch of the US military combined. We’re talking here about people who are one hundred percent dedicated to destroying the Leftist enemy and reclaiming America That Was. He shoulda damned well pulled the fucking trigger, not just for his and his family’s personal well-being, but that of the betrayed and defiled Republic, and its sane, normal, decent population.

In some very real ways, we’d all be better off right now if he’d done it; the ones who would have been worse off are the windrows after windrows of shitlib corpses stacked high and tight from sea to shining sea, and they have it coming. We can argue from now till Doomsday about why Trump didn’t call on all able-bodied Citizen Soldiers to rally to the side of our rightful President to back him in standing up to the most dangerous threat America has ever had to face, but it doesn’t much matter anymore—whatever his reasons, and I can think of a good few that hold at least some water, he didn’t, so…so…

Well, as I always say: here we all are. Be that as it may, there’s an argument to be made Trump’s perfectly understandable disinclination to go to the last desperate extreme speaks well of the man, in at least some ways.

If you ask me, Trump has shown greater restraint than any man alive in the world today. Greater restraint perhaps than almost any man in history: For there are very few men, even in small and trivial nations, who could launch a civil war if they chose to do it. That sort of following—so wide, so deeply committed, and so much on the precipice of fury unleashed—is truly rare. The fact that Trump did not call upon his supporters to do violence on January 6 is singular, incredible: What leftist, on the verge of losing his power in Washington, and yet possessed of the means of retaining it through coercive force, would have walked away as Trump did?

Now the establishment—the Liz Cheneys, the Nancy Pelosis, the Mitch McConnells and Mitt Romneys—are terrified because they know Trump still has that following. They know the nation, left to choose its own president, would choose Trump again. And they can’t possibly let that happen.

Trump is the only real threat—not to world peace and stability, not to economic security or energy independence, but to the power of the elites. The elites want that power more than anything—they cannot walk away—and they are willing to do anything, even destroy the entire planet with war or disease, sooner than they would see Trump become president again.

But they ought to be careful. The next time they steal an election, it may not take a speech to start a civil war.

After having been run through the Democrat meatless-meat grinder over the last several years with no letup in sight, one would certainly hope it wouldn’t, since a resolute, swift, and uncompromising response to blatant, self-evident treason would constitute evidence that at least some Americans do still retain a kinship with the ideals, the bravery, and the selfless devotion to duty of the Founding Fathers, and are willing to let those timeless beliefs guide their actions and decisions.

Sadly, all available signs from November 2020 up to right this very minute would seem to point us in a very different direction. It’s all too apparent that all too many of us have learned all too little from the supine, boneless response to the broad-daylight theft of an American Presidential election—a barefaced coup for which no criminal conspirator has yet faced serious consequences. No sane person wants this fight to commence, and who would? The prospect is utterly dreadful, horrifying beyond comprehension.

In any event, all of Dan’s above-cited points are well taken and ably made, certainly. But for my money, the most interesting part comes earlier in the piece.

For all the hysteria over Trump’s divisive tweets, the truth is that Trump is the only unifying figure in modern political history: He persuaded millions of people who had never voted for any Republican, indeed for any president, to vote for him. During his first term, he increased his share of the vote with every segment of the population, except college-educated whites. No Republican since Reagan received such broad support from so many groups. And he won their support not by pandering to their sub-category interests or to the things that set them apart, but by appealing to them as Americans.

Spot on, and of far greater import than one might realize at first glance, if only for the big fat hint it provides as to how many out there might still consider a candidate for office “appealing to them as Americans” to be a good thing, rather than a bad or even offensive one. Alas, it’s much too late now to hold out hope that any such Trumpian reassertion of American unity and shared values might suffice to heal this mortally wounded nation.

No sane person wants this fight; who would? But the lines are firmly established; the ideological breach cannot be reconciled, negotiated away, or blithely ignored for very much longer. The national divide is real, serious…and wholly meet and just, actually. Like it or not—and nobody should like it—this is a battle that every American who takes his God-granted liberty, his rights, and self-determination at all seriously has no choice but to fight, and to win.

One can easily sense a broad uneasiness across the American landscape, a foreboding that violence and bloodshed might erupt at any time: in a month, in a week, in a few days, or in the morning. The distempered nitwits at The Grauniad post some stats.

More than one quarter of US residents feel so estranged from their government that they feel it might “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, a poll released on Thursday claimed.

This survey of 1,000 registered US voters, published by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), also revealed that most Americans agree the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me”.

The data suggests that extreme polarization in US politics – and its impact on Americans’ relationships with each other – remain strong. These statistics come as a congressional committee is holding public hearings on the January 6 insurrection.

Naturally, being Mark-1 Mod-0 shitlibs, The Grauniad whiffs badly on the stark reality that the phonied-up, purely partisan J6 dog and pony show currently being staged in Mordor On The Potomac constitutes irrefutable proof that “most Americans” are RIGHT to believe that their vile, tyrannical government is “corrupt” and “rigged,” in every least particular. Can there possibly be even a single knave left among us so foolish, so blind, so out of touch that he’d contend—sans sarcasm, irony, or satirical intent—that it ISN’T?

Even farther beyond the demonstrably limited ken of The Grauniad and their intellectual brethren is another inescapable truth: the endemic corruption mentioned in Paragraph Two is the very thing which has forced Real Americans to conclude that a resort to the Second Amendment Solution “might soon be necessary,” a prospect lamented with such horror and dread in Paragraph One. Far from being unrelated, the two notions are indivisible; absent the one, the other would likely not exist.

Liberal nincompoops will rend their garments, gnash their teeth, and tear their hair out in great hanks over how awful all this is, something underlined by the inter-party disparities in this graph:

Myself, I can’t honestly say I share the Left’s blood-curdling perturbation over this survey’s revelation of a perfectly accurate perception of massive corruption and malfeasance so deeply embedded in the central government it can never be rooted out by less than extraordinary measures and what might be the upshot of that. Nor am I troubled in the least by the calm acceptance of the Founders’ explicit prescription for how a free people must always deal with this intolerable situation—sentiments common amongst a rapidly growing cohort of Americans. To me, that’s encouraging news, albeit with a darker implication in train: if the American “education” system was what it should be—and, not all that long ago, actually was—we wouldn’t be discussing an embarrassingly niggling percentage of “more than one quarter of American residents” here. No, if Americans had been properly schooled in history and civics, that measly “more than a quarter” number would be well up into the 90s, as it damned well ought to be.

The notion that a liberty-minded citizenry might not disdain to avail themselves of the selfsame methods by which our long-abused country was created in the first goddamned place is assuredly NOT radical, extreme, or in any way indicative of a fascination with “white supremacy.” Like so very many other of the Founders’ ideas, the Freeman’s solemn obligation to rise up in revolt to overthrow any would-be oppressor who dares to proclaim himself the Freeman’s rightful Master rather than his humble employee is eternal. This obligation may be shirked; it is certainly an inconvenient, difficult, and demanding one. But none can ever call himself free who refuses to at least try to meet the challenge it represents.