Folks, we have been beaten.

We have not lost the war, but we have been dealt a big setback while we were not paying attention.

Allow me to explain, beginning as all good Southern gentlemen do – with an anecdote!

The biggest mistake I have ever made in my career of negotiating deals, joint ventures and sales of companies, was to go into the negotiations believing that all the parties were entering into the discussions with good faith. While that is often true, there are just as many times when there are undisclosed, ulterior motives at work, sometimes within your own side of the negotiation.

I have been burned. Over the years, I have learned to trust no one in these proceedings until they prove they can be trusted. I realize that seems to be a very cynical position, and it is one that goes against my own nature and core beliefs. One a personal level, I always trust until people prove themselves untrustworthy but, in a negotiation, that is a killer. Finding out who you can trust is critical to getting any agreement or deal done. Having someone crawfish (an old Southern term for backing up – crawfish move tail first) at the eleventh hour is the equivalent of having a witness recant their testimony in the middle of a murder trial.

You are always best served by following Reagan’s First Law of Agreements: Trust but verify. TBV will save you a lot of pain.

TBV relates to our battle this way: it is important to note that America’s entire systems of government and jurisprudence rely on the very fragile concept of trust until proven untrustworthy. Even our foundational doctrine of presumption of innocence rests on the idea that the accused is trusted, and it is the job of the accuser to prove they are not trustworthy. We look at our systems the same way, we implicitly place our trust in them and the people who occupy positions within those systems because we assume they are acting in good faith and in accordance with our commonly agreed upon principles.

But what happens if they are not? What if these people are actively pursuing the installation of an agenda driven by one ideology or another? What if they are not acting in good faith?

Let us just say that, several years ago, the progressive movement shifted their focus from electing people to write progressive laws that never could get passed through America’s center-right government to installing people in offices where they could influence the INTERPRETATION of standing law in ways more in accordance with the progressive agenda.

That meant getting collectivist leaning District Attorneys, judges and commission members in place.

Many Americans do not know about the efforts of progressive individuals and groups to populate our judicial system with progressive ideologues. Funded by entities like George Soros’ Open Society organization and by other wealthy progressives, anti-American, ANTIFA and BLM supporting people have been successfully installed in our systems. From the neo-communist San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin (son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who were Weather Underground members in the 60’s) to the anti-police Philadelphia District Attorney, Larry Krasner, these people are changing the meaning of American law through prosecutorial and judicial “discretion”.

Progressive DA’s in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas and LA have erased theft as a crime, many refusing to prosecute any individual theft of less than a thousand dollars or so, resulting, of course, in a wave of thefts. YouTube and Rumble are filled with videos of people walking into stores, sweeping shelves clean and then walking out and the store employees saying that it does no good to report the thefts because the police are not allowed to come.

Lest you think these are isolated incident, the three judges on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that just ruled that ballot observers had a right under state law to be in the room where the ballots were counted but they had no right to actually observer the ballots being counted, were all three aided in attaining their elected judgeships by the Soros funded Democracy Alliance. Between them, these three raised $8.81 million dollars (Kevin Dougherty, David Wecht and Christine Donahue - $3.98 million, $2.88 million and $1.95 million respectively) to campaign for a job that pays $215,037 per year.

I heard an interview with the newly elected chairman of the Texas Republican party, Lt. Col. Alan West, where he stated that conservatives must focus on races all the way down to the local school boards, that the progressive movement is now focused on infesting systems at such a level.

Let me ask, how many of Americans just automatically checked the box to retain elected judges in your state without even knowing their records? I have done it – but not this year. My wife and I researched their decisions and studied their ratings by independent groups who report on their decisions. We even voted against one judge who was recommended due to our disagreement with some of his decisions.

The point being, you cannot win the war if you do not even know where the battles are being fought. There are more battles raging down the ballot than at the top even thought the attention is proportionally higher the closer to the top of the ballot you go.

As conservatives, we need to do a better job of finding where the battles are.