Their voices  were  even  and  low,

  Their  eyes  were  level  and  straight.

   There was neither sign nor show,

  When  the  English  began  to  hate.

-Rudyard Kipling

I'm not going to legally analyze the charges against Donald Trump.  Many people have done that better than I can.  I can only tell you what I perceive is the gravity of the present situation from my knowledge of history:  We are in dire straits.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.  -Winston Churchill

We are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Paul Graham: If you'd told me as a kid that in the 2020s liberals would be the ones punishing dissent and the protest songs would be conservative, I not only wouldn't have believed it, I couldn't even have imagined it.

Humanity does not suppress an error without simultaneously erasing several truths. -Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism." -Ronald Reagan, 1975

Lebron's school is failing although it's very well-funded and does everything Democrats would like. It's a family! Maybe that's the problem.

A law professor sniffs at objections from Trump as to the fairness of the DC venue. This reveals the ugly power-hungry beast that is leftism. It sees no injustice if done to its competitors for power.

"We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. F.B.I. is tending in that direction." -Harry Truman

“You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”  -Unknown

Civilization requires universal standards. 

Either all our cultures will develop a sense of accountability or all will develop a sense of unaccountability:  A house divided cannot stand.

“sufficient female institutional power is incompatible with what we call civilization.”  -@explicatur1

“Given how passive celibacy has become the overwhelming temptation of our time, maybe aspiring servants of God should take a vow of nymphomania”  -@filthyarmenian

The left uses science the way the Germans used to:  It means what they want it to mean.  Their studies all point in one direction, that humans are in mortal danger and the only solution is leftism in power with fewer checks and balances than before.

“A republic, if you can keep it.”  -Ben Franklin

“Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of goodness in the wrong way.”  -CS Lewis

Matt Yglesias:  Any means of forcing Japanese surrender would have killed incredible numbers of civilians, the guilty parties are the imperial officials who insisted on continuing a hopeless war.

Me:  And most importantly way more of our guys.

Marxist He/Hims: 

Nationalism is gross.

Beyond America's borders do not live a lesser people.

Actually soldiers of any sort dying is better than civilians of any sort dying.

“There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses— say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism.”  -CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”  -CS Lewis, Prince Caspian

People have a tendency to wallpaper over times and places with which they are unfamiliar with a  kind of light blue color.  "Oh that tribe I know nothing about?  Sure maybe some of them were mean but by and large I bet they were nice."

In some cases the wallpaper is covering a horrible infestation.

Consider the not-atypical Roman conquering of Carthage.  How was it different from the conquests of Hitler?  The past WAS Hitler.

The quarrel is begun... In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.  –Edmund Burke, 1770 describing a conflict between the King and the House of Commons

"Whoever said ‘the customer is always right’ was a customer."  –Jimmy Hatlo in Daytona Beach Morning Journal April 2, 1943

I was reading a mainstream history website about technological contributions of various ancient regions.  When I got to sub-saharan Africa, there was one entry:  The Dogon people of Mali.  They knew thousands of years before everyone else about Jupiter's moons and the Sirius star system, things practically invisible to the naked eye.  Or so the website said.  It turns out, to a few brave souls, the likelihood that one anthropologist lied seemed a little stronger than the mystical discovery by otherwise backward people isolated in the interior of Africa.  One even went back to check.

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.”  ― Lee Kuan Yew

We write things down, both to help us remember, and to help us forget. –Naval

There's a genre of leftwing error that relies on knowing exactly one thing about a topic.  If you know two or zero you can't have the leftwing view.

Heard from a leftist lady today that Americans are fat because they're poor: Let's demolish this like a fat guy with a McDouble.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment. -Francois de La Rochefoucauld

One of the links between Freud and Marx is their purportedly rational, scientific-sounding explanations for things. You get the same stuff from Magnus Hirschfeld, of Weimar Sex Clinic fame. A lot of what is going on is the academic laundering of a particular worldview.  -@threejacques