America’s descent into banana republicanism continues apace, and on two fronts.  To begin with, we learn that President Trump’s much-disdained assertion that Trump Tower was being wiretapped during the election campaign turns out to be absolutely true.  On September 19, CNN reported that Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower and was Trump’s campaign manager in the early stages of the campaign, was wiretapped—that’s the word CNN uses—a full two years before the election, and also after Trump’s victory.  Trump’s tweet of March 4, 2017, reads: “Terrible!  Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

Oh, how the media laughed at that Trump tweet: He’s paranoid!  He’s deluded!  Is he crazy?  They aren’t laughing anymore.  Instead, they’re spinning wildly, trying to justify and minimize what “sources told CNN” in mid-September .

These types of things are supposed to happen only in, say, Bolivia, or even Russia.  That it happened here, in the republic of the Founding Fathers, is not even causing a ripple.  After a year of leaks from the “intelligence community” designed to undermine the Trump presidency—when entire transcripts of his private conversations with foreign leaders are published on the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times—it’s all taken as a matter of course.  And the cynicism of our corrupt political class, which delights in the fact that this sea change is taken so lightly, has seeped down to the rest of us: But of course we’re no different from Lower Slobbovia!  After all, wouldn’t it be “nativist” to assume otherwise?

What this means is that we’re living in a police state.  Oh, sure, we have elections and party primaries, the First Amendment is still operative (although under increasing challenge).  Yet standing above this illusory Potemkin Village of “democracy” is the machinery of ubiquitous surveillance.  The Deep State—the CIA, the National Security Agency, the FBI, etc.—has access to everything.  They scoop it up, they store it away, and when they need it they release it via their friends in the media.  There’s a dossier on every politician of any consequence in the country, and it just takes pressing a few buttons to reveal their darkest secrets to the world.

What do we call a political system that’s based on blackmail?  An extortocracy?

On one level, this is how the Deep State is dealing with the populist revolution represented by Trump’s victory: by policing the political class and eliminating those who represent a threat, or a potential threat, to the status quo.

On another level, however, the effort to cleanse the system of politically incorrect tendencies is taking on a mass character with a campaign to replace the electorate.  How is this being done?  Simple: Legalize voting by illegal aliens.

The DACA executive order was the first step; 800,000 “Dreamers” were allowed to stay in the country, despite their illegal status, with the eventual goal of legalizing them via a “path to citizenship.”  And of course we aren’t just talking about a mere 800,000.  Their parents, their uncles, their cousins, and their entire extended families will also be included in what is looking to be the most massive amnesty in American history.  What this means is millions of new voters directly imported from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.  Venezuela, the latest Latin American failed state, will probably be the next source of freshly minted “new Americans.”

And it won’t stop with the “Dreamers.”  Both Chicago and (of course!) San Francisco allow illegals to vote in some local elections.  The city council of College Park, Maryland, a dark-blue bastion of yuppiedom, recently voted to grant illegal aliens the “right” to vote in local elections.  And, as Newsweek reports,

Noncitizen voting is also legal in two other cities in Prince Georges [sic] County—Hyattsville and Mount Rainier—as well as the neighboring Montgomery County cities of Takoma Park, Barnesville, Garrett Park, Glen Echo, Martin’s Additions and Somerset.

This is the next step in the “antiracist” neo-Maoist cultural revolution that has been launched by the left and is conquering the media, academia, and our coastal colonies of clueless cosmopolitans.  This is the ultimate goal of the left-wing elites who will do anything to grab and hold power in this country: If the electorate defies them, then the only solution is to replace the electorate.  The lowest estimate of illegal aliens currently in the U.S. is 11.1 million, which means the scales are about to be tipped decisively, and the elite project of voter-replacement will be accomplished.  Millions of fresh voters who last cast ballots for the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party or the Chavistas, swooning at the tirades of some tinhorn caudillo, will be easy prey for our numerous homegrown versions in the Democratic Party.

By valorizing and legitimizing illegal immigration, the open-borders crowd denigrates and devalues the concept of American citizenship and denies its necessary connection to a sense of place.  This isn’t just an ideological concept conjured by preening, virtue-signaling academics and their media camarilla.  It’s cold political calculation.  It’s a key part of the plan, the battering ram the globalist elites will wield to smash the last remnants of our old republic.  Are they carrying out their agenda?

Leave the U.S.-Mexican border largely unguarded: check!  Establish large colonies of illegals throughout the country: check!  Grant illegals drivers’ licenses, establish “sanctuary cities,” and give the “Dreamers” amnesty: check!  Agitate for “undocumented voting rights” for local elections under the slogan “No taxation without representation!”: check!

What remains?  Sue to include federal elections, including the presidential race, on the grounds that the same principle applies.  (Remember, the Ninth Circuit rules the country.)  Checkmate.

This, by the way, is the ultimate riposte to the Beltway “libertarian” crowd, which embarrasses itself by advocating a de facto antilibertarian policy, one that would effectively marginalize the actually existing libertarian movement, such as it is.  Transgender-toilet rights are so yesterday—the illegal-alien suffrage “rights” movement is slated to be the new vanguard of the civil-rights revolution.  You’ve been warned.