Please bear with me. I'm having some trouble here.

Free at last, free at last—in three more days.

Early morning Wolf Moon up here at the guitar, motorcycle, and llama orchard in the Northern Rockies. Some of those tracks are from a mountain lion.

Only three days left. Three days until the dagger is firmly (and I hope irrevocably) plunged into the heart of DEI, progressive gaslighting about border security, gender issues, the drug epidemic, the Green New Deal, Israel, homelessness, climate change and its bearing on wildfires in SoCal, and a host of other issues. Three freaking days. But I won’t relax until I can hold my breath for the time left on the clock to run out. Right now, that’s around 60 seconds without turning blue, which means the crack of 11:59 am EST next Monday.

I look around these days, not just in America but all over the world, and marvel at the degree to which humanity is governed by stupors, vapors, and liberal postmodern bullshit. I am evidently not alone. Progressive regimes are falling all over the western world for roughly the same reasons as here. The big lie only works for so long in non-totalitarian regimes. That’s why the expert class, who peddled big lies to us for the past decade, are such enthusiasts of totalitarian style content moderation, which, according to them, is necessary to combat the existential threat of disinformation. When you are in the business of peddling disinformation, strongarming is the only way to win arguments.

But the jig is up. One may draw a reasonably straight line from 2016 Brexit and Trump being elected POTUS the first time, to COVID gaslighting and totalitarianism a few years later, to the current fall of Trudeau in Canada along with progressive rule in Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Greece, Austria, Sweden, and Australia to Trump’s next inaugural in just a few days. Everyone not in the thrall of progressivism, or simply with eyes and ears that work, has just had enough. Biden was fit as a fiddle, according to everyone on the left (except for former congressman Dean Phillips) and most of the media. Yes sireee.

There’s more. I predict that California, which is a larger entity economically than many of the aforementioned countries, will be next. California Governor Gavin Newsom claims that Blue California is the model for the rest of America. Screw that, California isn’t even an effective governing model for California—at least what’s going to be left of it after the current one-party exacerbated plagues of fire, flood, lawlessness, and homelessness run their course.

After I drop off four kids at three different bus stops each school morning, I drive down into town to Gate City Coffee to read newspapers in an attempt to make sense of the world. I’m occasionally joined by former colleagues from the university, business, and public service where we dissect the news together. I like this group because they are, though quite diverse, all alike in that they are smart and brimming with integrity. Every one of them has stood up for something and taken heat for it. I’m often disappointed in the world at large, but I have unlimited respect for individuals who do the right thing when it’s hard. Calling a spade a spade is, these days, mostly beyond our ken. Most people now, regardless of station in life, won’t say bullshit even if they’ve been fed a mouthful and are trying to spit it out. When you find people who aren’t scared to call bullshit, you need to keep them close. It’s water of life kind of stuff.

This morning, the manned moon landings, all of which occurred more than 50 years ago, came up. Even though my first job as a freshman in college involved handling lunar samples, I'm becoming, all these years later, more sympathetic to the notion that the moon landings might actually have been faked. This because I find it more and more difficult to accept that our forebears, armed only with slide rules and ruthless competence, sent men to the moon and back nine times, landing them safely six times, when today we can’t figure out that climate change has nothing to do with putting out wildfires in SoCal and that green energy is not better than nuclear energy for fixing what climate change is actually responsible for. Leading scientists and policymakers can't these days properly interpret simple graphs. Right now, scientology has more influence than science, thanks in no small part to Mr. I am the science, Anthony Fauci. How is it possible that we went from putting men on the moon with IBM 360s and the HASP DOS to a confederacy of dunces presided over by woke progressive nosferatu whose daylight is merit in just five decades? It boggles the mind.

But here we are. Please bear with me because I’m having some trouble with it all. Until Monday, that is.

But we aren’t there just yet. This morning, the AP posted a story: “Biden says the Equal Rights Amendment is’the law of the land.’ What is it, and what happens next?” It’s worth clicking the link just for your amusement and edification in discovering the incredulity that even the AP, which has become as woke of a news organization as there is, expresses in this piece. The short version is that Biden’s take on the resuscitation of the decades-dead ERA is in no way, shape, form, manner, or style true. He and the left can wish and pontificate all they want, but it just ain’t so.

The hell of it is, even I mostly agree with the ERA, if you replace the language about gender (which meant something completely different back in the 1970s when the ERA was crafted than it does now) and replace it with biological sex. I don’t think that you should discriminate against anyone except on the basis of merit. Put that in words that have clear meaning, and I’m down. But the ERA has simply not been ratified. Sans that, it’s not the law of the land no matter what the Knucklehead in Chief proclaims.

But, incredibly, we have an outgoing POTUS, the president of the United-Effing-States of America, arguably the most powerful human on the entire planet, who, just as the screen door is hitting him in his cognitively impaired fanny, has manufactured from whole cloth an interpretation of our constitution that only he and his cronies see as legal and valid. You name the issue: illegal drugs, illegal immigration, crime, homelessness, the economy, COVID, climate change, wildfires, grooming gangs, and on and on, and you arrive at the same place. We didn’t replace slide rules and competence with the Internet and wonders of the information age; we replaced them with bullshit.

That’s why Donald J. Trump is being inaugurated in about 72 hours. I didn’t even vote for the SOB, but I completely approve. The Brits got the attention of their progressive political elites with Brexit, the Canadians, by ousting Trudeau. Here in the U.S. of A., it’s Trump. I can hardly wait.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com