THIS SITUATION REQUIRES AN ABSOLUTELY FUTILE AND STUPID GESTURE.

That is to say, just another day of getting into trouble at Delta Tau Chi.

As I post this, there is a futile and stupid gesture or two taking place in Washington, D.C., where frustrated Trump loyalists are occupying the Federal Capitol, and the coot is dismayed and saying it must end.  Now.

The discontent, though, has been a long time in coming.  It's likely that former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, would like the insurgency to stop.  He, too, has been pushed too far by the antics of the Democrats and their palace guard media.

Having spent more than four years watching the left #Resist President Donald Trump and focus entirely on undoing and undermining the 2016 election, it took me several days to understand the depth of my own feelings.

As I thought about it, I realized my anger and fear were not narrowly focused on votes. My unwillingness to relax and accept that the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years involvement in public affairs.

Shorter form: the political class, including their willing accomplices of the media, never accepted Donald Trump's presidency as valid, and by extension, they invalidated the wishes of the deplorables who put him there.

In 2016, I supported an outsider candidate, who was rough around the edges and in the Andrew Jackson school of controversial assaults on the old order. When my candidate won, it was blamed on the Russians. We now know (four years later) Hillary Clinton’s own team financed the total lie that fueled this attack.

Members of the FBI twice engaged in criminal acts to help it along — once in avoiding prosecution of someone who had deleted 33,000 emails and had a subordinate use a hammer to physically destroy hard drives, and a second time by lying to FISA judges to destroy Gen. Michael Flynn and spy on then-candidate Donald Trump and his team. The national liberal media aided and abetted every step of the way. All this was purely an attempt to cripple the new president and lead to the appointment of a special counsel — who ultimately produced nothing.

Now, people in my world are told it is time to stop resisting and cooperate with the new president. But we remember that the Democrats wanted to cooperate with Mr. Trump so much that they began talking about his impeachment before he even took office. The Washington Post ran a story on Democrat impeachment plots the day of the inauguration.

In fact, nearly 70 Democratic lawmakers boycotted his inauguration. A massive left-wing demonstration was staged in Washington the day after, where Madonna announced she dreamed of blowing up the White House to widespread applause. These same forces want me to cooperate with their new president. I find myself adopting the Nancy Pelosi model of constant resistance. Nothing I have seen from Mr. Biden since the election offers me any hope that he will reach out to the more than 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump.

Having sown the wind: "The election process itself was the final straw in creating the crisis of confidence which is accelerating and deepening for many millions of Americans." There's a lot more in his column, including this summation.

For more than four years, the entire establishment mobilized against the elected president of the United States as though they were an immune system trying to kill a virus. Now, they are telling us we are undermining democracy.

You have more than 74 million voters who supported President Trump despite everything — and given the election mess, the number could easily be significantly higher. The truth is tens of millions of Americans are deeply alienated and angry.

Enough so that perhaps only a futile and stupid gesture is available to them.  Here's Conrad Black.

Trump was elected in 2016 because he tapped into a profound discontent whose existence and extent were not remotely suspected by the American political establishment and media. Undetected, half the country thought that the United States was being incompetently managed by a bipartisan claque of permanent federal officeholders and financial and celebrity and academic elites, for their own benefit, indifferent to the welfare or opinions of middle America, and oblivious to the damage done by the 2008 economic calamity, disadvantageous trade agreements and immersion in fruitless Middle Eastern wars.

A political death struggle has ensued between that formerly complacent elite and a populist mass of people presciently rallied by Trump, which agrees with his bluntly expressed views and policy prescriptions. The contest between these closely matched forces is straining the American political system. From the outset, Trump has been running against the entire political establishment and promising to “drain the swamp”: radical changes of policy and personnel. The battle of his opponents to preserve their incumbency and repel the barbarian (Trump) has been fanatical, ingenious and absolutely ruthless.

As I'm typing this. Mr Trump has asked his followers to stand down, although he continues to assert that the process was fraudulent. It's by no means over.

The Biden administration, if it takes office at all, will be a clangorous “Gong Show.” Either Trump, or a Republican approved by him and continuing his policies, will be the Republican candidate in four years. Then we will have the final round in this battle for the political soul of America. What we are hearing now is the Trump-hating goose cackling too loudly and too soon.

The battle for the political soul of these United States never ends. Yuval Levin explains.

Our system does not trust leaders, but it also does not trust the public. It looks to each to restrain and direct the other. Political leaders have an obligation to be honest with their voters and to serve those voters’ interests by connecting their legitimate grievances with the hard realities of governing. They need to choose to address real problems and ignore fake problems. By choosing not to do that, too many Republicans are choosing to fail their voters.

The cost Republicans will pay for this failure will not necessarily be a political or electoral cost. This kind of cynical performance art is not bad politics right now. And Republicans are pretty well positioned to prosper electorally in the coming decade. Our system grants some modest but meaningful structural advantages to the country party (which for now is the Republican Party) over the city party, demographic changes don’t seem to be playing out politically as the Left imagined they would, and the Democratic Party risks doubling down on a nasty combination of radicalism and elitism that isn’t likely to sell well in American politics.

There's nothing that says being of extraction other than European, or of an unusual sexuality, makes a person necessarily an intersectional socialist.  It's on the Republican establishment to continue to stand up for free minds and free markets, without getting into deplorable-shaming.  "The GOP needs Middle Americans to be excited about their candidate and to vote in large numbers. This will only happen if GOP leadership can put aside its hatred for Trump and examine why the bully from New York City excited the electorate in 2016, and even in defeat in 2020, won 74 million votes."