I spent all afternoon and all evening yesterday disengaged, as best as I could, from the disgraceful circus surrounding America’s failed election Tuesday. I had to, because after a pretty relentless two-week grind and a near all-nighter covering the election returns at The Speakeasy, I had hit my limit and couldn’t go any further without a break from the carnage they’ve turned our political process into.

Tuesday I noted a bit of Roman history in that post which included the video of Tucker Carlson’s monologue on Monday. Specifically, it was a comparison between Donald Trump and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the famous tribune who, seeing deep flaws in what the Roman Republic had become, embarked on an effort at aggressive societal reform, starting with redistributing land from the corrupt elite back to the people. Gracchus’ aim was to give ordinary, “deplorable” Romans more access to the fruits of the burgeoning empire.

For his trouble Gracchus was beaten to death in the street. And when his brother Gaius attempted a similarly aggressive reform program as tribune 10 years later, he was hounded from power by a mob ginned up by the elites and ultimately committed suicide.

There were no consequences for the Roman elites for what was done to the Gracchus brothers. None. And without any consequences, the corruption in Rome only grew – so much so that the Republic died a few decades later, replaced by an empire run by a succession of more and more depraved dictators.

Everyone saw it coming. Nobody did anything to stop the corruption. Corruption without consequences, and an unfettered elite which no longer represented the virtues of the republic but rather its vices, led to the decline of Rome and its devolution into a wicked, depraved, tyrannical society destined for the ash-heap of history.

And we are where the Romans were when the reform-minded Gracchus brothers were hounded out of Roman politics.

I had friends who are with the Trump campaign tell me yesterday that this is all going to work out, that the Democrats are cheating like madmen but that Arizona ultimately goes to Trump despite Fox News’ corrupt call of the state to Biden, and that Trump will hold Pennsylvania. They’re even declaring victory in fraud-torn Michigan, though that seems more bombast and defiance than a real claim.

Hey, I’m willing to believe it. I’ll take plausible good news over bad news any day, and I can be persuaded of the plausibility of Trump hanging on with 278 votes even after the absolutely brazen efforts to steal the election virtually everywhere Democrats are in control.

My mood isn’t the result of despondency that the election is lost. I don’t think it’s lost. At least, I’m not sure it’s lost.

What I’ve recognized, what that late night on Tuesday taught me, is that the election is just a symptom of something a whole lot worse.

At the end of the day, it’s this: the game will continue until the Left says it’s over. And the Left will only say it’s over when the Left wins.

And once the Left has won, there will be no more game.

In the last century, there was a phrase for this which described the march of communism through the Third World: one man, one vote…one time.

Another way to say this is that you might vote your way into socialism, but you’ll have to shoot your way out.

And the Democrat Party in America now has assumed the mantle of those atrocious 20th century totalitarians and Third World socialist kleptocrats for whom the corruption of the political process in search of raw power was the end-all and be-all of their existence.

They will never stop. And there are no limits.

The old Democrat Party at least recognized a limiting principle. Yes, the urban political machines they built and maintained were pitifully corrupt and grasping, but there were at least some things they recognized they couldn’t do. They shared some respect for the preservation of our institutions.

None of that is true now. We’ve seen how they’ve corrupted and politicized everything they’ve brought under their control, to the point that very little of it works anymore. Schools and colleges turn out inferior products, the news media has squandered its credibility, Hollywood’s offerings are mostly unwatchable and don’t sell, everyone hates the social media platforms the Left weaponizes. And on and on.

All that’s left for them is to expand the roster of things they control and therefore stamp out competing ideas and activities. To spread their power out to every corner of society. The girl scouts, the NBA, the church down the street. They can’t stop, won’t stop.

They won’t stop because there are no consequences.

Were there consequences to the theft of the 1960 election? No. Were there consequences to the attempted theft of the 2000 election? No.

Does anyone expect consequences to the theft, attempted or completed, of this election? Why would you? There were no consequences to Hillary’s emails or the Clinton Foundation treason/influence-peddling scam. Or to FISAgate. Or to the fraudulent impeachment. Or to anything having to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop: Burisma, Bohai Harvest, Sinohawk or any of it.

The Trump campaign is making noises along the lines of finally attempting to address the corruption and imposing consequences as a result. But talk won’t get it done. One reason Trump is in the fix he’s in is that his administration allowed itself to be maneuvered into playing defense against a Deep State fraud the Obama administration put on its doorstep, and did nothing effective to dissolve the Trump-Russia-Mueller witchhunt for three years.

And now even if the President manages to survive this attempt to steal this failed election from him, the past four years will have been a Swedish massage compared to the next four. Because when there are no consequences to the corruption, the corruption only grows.

He’ll be impeached again. The “Resistance” will grow more aggressive. The cities will burn. And anything he does to put a stop to it will be evidence he’s a “fascist” or a “racist” or whatever other epithets are applied to him already.

Which means there’s a little bit of freedom Trump has if he’s willing to actually do something to retaliate. To impose consequences on the corrupt elite who have conspired to steal this election.

Among his many weaknesses, Joe Biden has a very pronounced specific one. His son Hunter is that weakness.

To date, out of a sense of what we might call Christian charity, little attention has been paid to the more salacious items on that laptop – specifically the sexual misconduct purportedly on it. The specific videos the laptop contains haven’t been released, one reason supposedly being that they contain unmistakable child pornography involving Hunter as a participant.

Well, if – if – that’s true, then Hunter Biden ought to be arrested without delay on federal charges of child pornography, child molestation and sex trafficking, not to mention anything else that an enterprising federal prosecutor might pull off that hard drive with which an indictment could be cobbled together.

Forthwith. Before the weekend.

The thing is this: anyone willing to examine the evidence already in the public domain will be convinced that Hunter Biden was the front man in a racketeering, money laundering and bribery scheme involving his influence-peddling father, but it takes a bit of attention and brainpower to go through a complicated case like that. But if the scuttlebutt is true about the illicit sex videos on that hard drive, there’s no analysis involved. If he’s on those videos and those are underage kids he’s with, and if the acts involved are as advertised, then it ain’t complicated. It’s simple.

So go get a warrant, go get him and stick him in a federal detention center, in solitary confinement, and on suicide watch. If it was good enough for Paul Manafort, it ought to be good enough for Hunter. Such circumstances were established for Manafort in an effort to induce him to rat on Trump, after all. He never broke. It’s fascinating to speculate what Hunter might choose in similar circumstances.

And then let’s watch Joe Biden decide how much he really wants to be president.

Does he really want to take office with his only surviving son languishing in a federal detention center, without bail as he’s surely a flight risk, charged with kiddie porn? What’s Biden going to do after his inauguration? Quash the prosecution? That’ll look good for the public and get his presidency off to a shiny start, won’t it?

Or, it might be offered to him via a back-channel, the electoral shenanigans could end. No more fraudulent mail ballots, no more blocs of votes magically appearing on the vote tallies, no more stolen election. He could concede. At that point there would be no consequences. No federal charges surrounding what’s on that laptop, no recriminations for the attempted theft of the election. The Bidens could skate back to Delaware and enjoy the spoils of a half-century slobbering on the public teat.

That’s just a sliver of what could, and maybe should, be done in order to impose consequences on these corrupt wannabe oligarchs who simply cannot relent in trying to impose themselves on us. The real question is, does our side have what it takes to fight this battle? Or are we content to let Gracchus fall victim to the beating in the street as our republic bleeds out next to him?