KURT SCHLICHTER WARNED US.

Last week, a plot by a motley coalition of anarchists to kidnap and hold a people's trial of Michigan governor Gretchen "Karen" Whitmer (D- Hell) came to light.

Discussions included using 200 men to "storm" the Capitol Building in Lansing, kidnap hostages, including Whitmer, and try the governor for treason, according to the affidavit.

The group met for field exercises and training this year and conducted surveillance of the governor's vacation home on at least two occasions in late August and September, the affidavit alleges. They also purchased a high-voltage Taser and night goggles for use in the kidnapping plot, according to court records. Members of the plot said they wanted to complete the kidnapping before the Nov. 3 election, according to the affidavit.

Authorities might have had some help foiling the action because a participant in the discussions had a case of good conscience.

Amy Cooter, a Vanderbilt sociologist who studies militias, believes Trump's call on people to stand up to their governors has factored into the actions of militia types in general, but she tells Reason she couldn't say for sure whether it had an impact on this particular group.

According to the affidavit, militiamen believed Whitmer and other state governors who had implemented strict lockdowns were violating the U.S. Bill of Rights and should be tried as traitors. This talk alarmed at least one member of the militia, who then contacted law enforcement to warn them. This is an interesting but unsurprising fact of the case, says Cooter.

"In usual times, about 90 percent of militia groups are what we call constitutionalists, meaning they are law abiding, they see themselves as working with law enforcement, while still being prepared and watching for signs of overreach," she says. "It is quite typical that groups in that category see it as their job to watch out for extremists."

Establishment wisdom seems to like the argument that some of Our President's more outrageous statements are egging on the extremists. The warning from Mr Schlichter is that Our President is a symptom of the discontent, and militant citizens taking the law into their own hands comprise the next step.

When the combined weight of the D.C. establishment and the media and Hollywood defeats Donald Trump, progressives face a decision point. They can change their ways and return America’s culture to how it was, where everyone gets a chance to participate, or they can double down on the new rules of mockery and exclusion to consolidate their own power.

But they are likely too foolish to realize the danger to our country as we know it, too blindly confident that they can play by one set of rules while forcing everyone else to play by another. Instead of seeking unity, they will do the opposite – more exclusion, more ostracism from self-determination for the people they consider unworthy. Despite a narrow win, they will claim a massive victory over people like [the guy in Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech], a mandate to complete the subjugation of Americans like him. After all, he’s deplorable. He’s irredeemable. He’s unworthy of respect. His interests are unworthy of representation. The elite will heave a sigh of relief that the threat has passed, that with Felonia von Pantsuit in the Oval Office our guy and those like him can be safely ignored.

Our guy and millions upon millions of others will get angry. Not merely miffed as with the Tea Party, not a bit perturbed as with Trump. Angry. Coldly furious not only that they have been exiled from their own republic but because they have been relentlessly insulted, abused, humiliated – and forced to pay for it all.

Because the elite will have made it clear that the system really is rigged against those outside their caste, and that there is no way for people like our guy to be heard merely by trying to be part of the existing political system. And instead of meekly submitting, millions and millions of people may begin to look to step outside of the system as currently constituted.

He wrote that column just over four years ago, when the smart money and all the polls were pointing to a Clinton and Kaine administration, and the past seven months of shutdowns have not done anything to disabuse Normals of the notion that the elite simply want everyone else to submit, meaning to mask up, shut up, and hope the relief checks come.  And the contradictions still exist in the Democrat coalition.  The best some among the palace guard media, such as Washington Post writer Rachel Kleinfeld, can do, is wring her hands.  "These ailments grow from a broken social contract, which we cannot repair from inside polarized bunkers. Instead, we must find some way to step back from the brink."  Search that column in vain for any understanding that the financial sector bailouts and mortgage assistance for people who had no business buying their houses in the first place, which inspired both Occupy and the Tea Party, let alone the Democrat's attempting to shush Occupy and Everybody Official mocking the Tea Party probably inspired the Sanders candidacies and Donald Trump, and now the shutdowns as an excuse to blame all that has gone wrong on Donald Trump and subjugate the Normals and close the small businesses and mandate masks until Kingdom Come?

That's not going to go well.

American leftists started to substitute race, sex, and sexual orientation for class. That is, instead of dividing America along economic lines, they divided it along immutable characteristics lines. By doing so, they created permanent fissures in society. The point, always, was to destroy constitutional government, the free market, and a liberty-oriented mindset, and replace it with pure statism: Rule by the iron hand of the so-called “expert.”

Ironically enough, this push, which started in and still has its center in, academia, managed to turn America into a class society. There were the university educated (look at our all Ivy League Supreme Court), and the “others,” the deplorables, the gun clutchers, etc. The computer revolution sped this class division, and the Wuhan virus has made perfectly plain how deep the divide had become.

Is anyone surprised that there are not multiple kinds of populism bubbling up?

There are many manifestations of populism, some from the left, and some from the right, but when the Political Consensus breaks down, and the usual medicine of a Realignment Election doesn't keep enough of the Consensus in place, then comes an insurgency. But the term "populism" misleads, in that often there is a vanguard, or perhaps a Pied Piper, and in the United States, the last two Pied Pipers were named Sanders and Trump. And Mr Judis submitted his book for publication after one Hillary Clinton had won the Democrat nomination and she looked to be a lock for the presidency.

Thus, perhaps, the current Elite Consensus is in worse shape than he would have his readers believe. That noted, there is much in the book to reward careful study, including the observation that, no matter how outrageous some elements of populism, left or right, appear to be, those elements emerge in response to real pain inflicted on real people by the prevailing consensus: banks bailed out, but not householders or pensioners; diversity celebrated in principle but in practice an ethnic dependent class appears; imports mean overseas cash to finance public spending. Then comes the harder task of ameliorating the pain and replacing the failed institutions. That's a task for another book.

Sometimes the populisms clash, in the streets of Portland or Los Angeles, and sometimes they make common cause, as in that recent attempt to kidnap Michigan's governor.  Elite contempt for Trumpian populism, or for Normals trying to make a living, is on display every day.  We don't know yet exactly how the elites will deal with intersectional populism.