Editorial

OPINION

As the forensic audits in Arizona near to a close, and other states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia begin to consider their own audits, rumors have swirled throughout the conservative world of a possible reversal of the election results once the fraud is proven. This rumor has been even been promoted by the likes of Mike Lindell as he travels throughout the country at various Freedom Rallies.

Those in conservative circles, including Jenna Ellis (who led President Trump’s legal team during the post-election fight), who have called this into question have often received nothing but scorn and ridicule from other conservatives. So we felt it prudent to examine the issue more thoroughly from a legal perspective.

The Legal Theater

Let’s begin by setting the stage with a brief discussion of how our system of laws, as laid out in the Constitution and the Federal Statutes, functions. When a crime is committed, proof of that crime alone is not enough to convict. That evidence must be tested and tried in a court of law. This process is clearly laid out in the 6th Amendment:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.”

The purpose of this is to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the evidence against the accused is sufficient to warrant a conviction. Without this process, we have the same kind of lawlessness that led to mob lynchings in the Democrat-controlled South after the Civil War, where the accused is convicted on the basis of falsified evidence heard by a biased judge and jury.

Law and order is much more than just evidence. It is the system established for evaluating that evidence against the statutory laws passed by the people’s representatives (State Legislatures/Congress) and existing case law.

Both statutory and case law are critically important in this process. Statutory law establishes the legal standard, and case law ensures consistent application of that legal standard across all applicable cases within a given jurisdiction. This is a broad generalization, of course, but it is sufficient for our purposes here.

How This Applies To Election Theft

While most, if not all, conservatives believe that the election was stolen, that belief alone is not enough to prove it. That’s the purpose of the forensic audits…to gather the evidence necessary to prove the theft beyond a reasonable doubt.

Just as with criminal cases, however, once that evidence is obtained it still has to be handled within the framework of our Constitution and laws in order to prove in a court of law that has jurisdiction over the case at hand that the election was stolen. That’s where the process of getting Trump “reinstated” hits a roadblock.

Jurisdiction, as stated in the 6th Amendment, is a critical aspect of the law. In our system of law and order, you can’t just take any case you want to any judge/court available. A prosecutor wouldn’t take a criminal case to a family law court any more than a defendant wouldn’t take their case to an appeals court before the case is heard in district court.

The case has to be argued before a court that has jurisdiction over the case. This is what the 6th Amendment means when it states that cases must be tried, “by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

In court pleadings, that is often the first issue that is dealt with. A prosecutor will prove that the court hearing the case has jurisdiction, meanwhile a defense attorney will often try and get a cased dismissed if he or she can argue successfully that the court lacks the jurisdiction to hear the case.

We are seeing the effects of jurisdiction here in Oklahoma after the Supreme Court’s decision in the McGirt case, which ruled that the State of Oklahoma did not have the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed by tribal members on tribal land.

The Presidency of the United States is, as it should be, out of the jurisdiction of most courts in the United States. This is why a President cannot be tried in a civil or criminal court while in office. They must be tried in a special “court” of impeachment conducted by the U.S. Senate only after charges have been brought by the House.

This is how our Framers established it in the Constitution, and is part of what has allowed the U.S. Presidency to be the most stable chief executive position of any country in the world since our nation’s founding.

How this creates a problem is that regardless of whether the election was fraudulent, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on January 20th. As such, there is only one way in our Constitution of removing a sitting President: Impeachment.

The Writ of Quo Warranto

There is a little known writ added to the D.C. Code a little over 100 years ago called the Writ of Quo Warranto that allows one to challenge an illegitimately seated President of the United States. This writ was used in 2011 in Drake v. Obama during the legal challenge to Obama’s qualifications to be President. That case, which was brought before the 9th U.S. Circuit, was dismissed because the court held that according to the D.C. Code the proper venue for the Writ was the D.C. Federal District Court.

Theoretically, if the evidence was strong enough, President Trump could file a Writ of Quo Warranto in the D.C. Federal District Court challenging the illegitimate seating of Biden as President. The problem here is that this is the same court that illegally convicted General Flynn by using The Hammer to pre-select the jury pool thereby ensuring that regardless of which jurors were selected the prosecution would win. If General Flynn, who was innocent, couldn’t win in that scenario, Trump likely couldn’t either.

Beyond that, even if by a miracle from Heaven Trump did win, this would not automatically mean he would be sworn in. Biden and Harris would be removed, but under the 25th Amendment the Presidential line of succession would then kick in. That leaves us with none other than President Nancy Pelosi.

Trump For Congress?

The only other scenario for Trump to regain the Presidency prior to the 2024 elections would be if Trump ran for Congress out of Florida. Assuming the GOP retakes the house during the ’22 midterms he would presumably be elected Speaker of the House, and then could lead an impeachment against Biden and Harris.

However, the House can only bring charges. It’s up to the Senate to convict and remove the President (and Vice President in this case) from office…and that takes a 2/3rds majority of 67 votes. Right now the GOP is about 18 votes shy of being able to pull that off (assuming Romney would vote against impeachment).

So What’s The Point Of The Audits?

You maybe asking by now, “if we can’t get Trump back in office, then what’s the point of going through all of the audits?” Think of it this way, even though you can’t bring the dead victim back to life each murder needs to be investigated and prosecuted in order for us to still have a society of law and order.

No, Trump is not going to be “reinstalled” as President. As we’ve clearly laid out, there is no legal vehicle to accomplish that since he is outside the Presidential line of succession. We have survived as a Nation this long because our system has stood the test of time…regardless of who is President. We’ve had far worse President’s than Biden (Obama, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson, to name a few) and have survived.

The fight to prove the election theft is each one of the states in question taking responsibility for the debacle that they allowed to happen back in November. After all, our Constitution leaves it up to each of the States to determine the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senator and Representative.”

If we are ever to fix this mess, and truly secure the blessings of Liberty to our posterity, it is up to the individual States to investigate and prosecute the election theft, and pass the laws necessary to ensure that it never happens again. If they don’t, then Trump not getting back in office is going to be the least of our worries.

Opinion

There is little doubt that the last 4 months have been brutally difficult for the MAGA Movement. From the swearing in of President*Biden and loss of the Senate, to the passing of Rush Limbaugh, 2021 have been a difficult pill to swallow for true conservatives everywhere. Yet beyond the pain of the loss we’ve experienced, our movement faces a moment of real crisis that will determine whether it has the capacity of reclaiming American Exceptionalism once and for all, or if we will have simply been a flash in the pan lead by larger-than-life personalities.

In many ways, I personally believe that we could end up being stronger, and more dangerous to the Left than ever. In conversations with close advisors, I have remarked that these last few months have born a striking resemblance to the post-crucifixion, pre-pentacost church. None of Jesus’ disciples wanted Him to die. In fact, it was unconscionable to them. After He rose from the grave, they most certainly did not want Him to leave them again. However, as we know from history – and as He told them before His ascension into Heaven – He had to leave them…for their sake.

If Jesus had stayed on earth, His ministry would have flourished, but it would likely never have left Israel. The Apostle Paul even said as much in Romans 11:25 when he explained to the church in Rome that the Gospel would never have went to the whole world unless it first left Israel. Once Jesus left, and the Holy Spirit was sent, Christianity – and indeed the whole world – would never be the same. The focus was, and still is, on Jesus Christ, however the indwelling of the Holy Spirit gave Christians the ability and strength to change the world. Indeed, in Acts 17:6 the disciples in Thessalonica were accused of having “turned the world upside down.”

Yet those early days of the church were tenuous ones. Now that the central figure (Jesus) was no longer walking among them in the flesh, it opened the door for false teachers and charlatans to creep into the church and take the new believers captive through slick words and false promises. Essentially these teachers knew exactly how to “talk the talk” to get people to follow them, and then ended taking advantage of the trust bestowed upon them to enrich themselves. The Book of Jude (the shortest book in the Bible) was written specifically as a warning about these types of people. If you haven’t read it recently, I strongly encourage you to.

How This Applies To MAGA

As you can see, the parallels between this period in Church history and the current state of the MAGA Movement are strikingly similar. We’ve just suffered the lost our leaders. Oh sure, President Trump is still around, and is still active on social media and in politics. His role now, however, is now on the periphery of the political concourse, limited to political endorsements for candidates in upcoming races. This is not to say he still doesn’t hold enormous power. He certainly does, as his endorsement is the most valuable one in the current political landscape. He is not, however, flying across the country holding rallies with 50,000 people every week.

The loss of “The Big Voice on the Right”, Rush Limbaugh, at the same time as President Trump leaving office has left a massive void in leadership for the MAGA Movement. It is at precisely this junction that our movement is at it’s most dangerous point, for the same reasons that the early church was at a tenuous point after Jesus ascended into heaven.

Make no mistake, just because they defeated Trump (although not legally) does not mean that now the Left (American Communists) is going to leave us alone. They know that we outnumber them. They know they are in the minority. As such, we still represent an existential threat to their existence. We are still Public Enemy #1 to the American Communists, and they will stop at nothing to destroy us.

They will likely use every imaginable weapon at their disposal. Most of those weapons, however, will fail simply because we see them coming. There is one weapon, however, that is so dangerous that it represents the single greatest threat to our existence and the future of freedom and liberty across the globe.

The Enemy Within

The weapon I’m talking about is infiltration. Just like with the early church, when the Enemy (I’m speaking here of Satan himself, who is behind the American Communists) realizes he can’t kill all of us he will do exactly what he did in the first century: he will use “false prophets” to infiltrate our ranks and take us down from within.

Like with the early church, the only way we will survive this attack is by holding fiercely to the truth. It will not be enough to accept someone into our movement simply because they sound exactly like us. We need to examine them by their motives and background in order to weed out the bad actors from those who are sincerely devoted to the cause of liberty.

Simply put, not everyone who talks like us, sounds like us, and is really good at getting a crowd riled up has good intentions. There are many…many…profiteers who have already infiltrated our ranks. If we don’t call them out they will certainly spell the downfall of our movement.

How To Spot A Fraud

There are many ways to spot these types of people, but the best way of telling a person’s true intentions is by knowing our own history and the kinds of men and women who fought, bled, and died for the cause of liberty. Our founders and framers did not come to the new world, forge a living out of the wilderness, and later take on the most powerful force in the world simply to become wealthy. In fact, many of them lost everything they had. All of them pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to the cause of liberty.

President Trump did the same thing. In fact, he was the first President in modern history to leave office less wealthy than he was when he went in. He was only the third President in United States history to have refused his presidential salary (JFK and Herbert Hoover were the other two), and bankrolled his campaign out of his own wealth. That’s part of what drew Americans to him by the millions. He was in it because he loved America. He loved America more than his own success, more than his own lifestyle, and more than his own comfort.

Using that standard, then, it becomes much easier to spot the fraudsters. While we are certainly not against someone earning their worth, someone who gets up on stage, speaks our language with passion and fury, but doesn’t actually accomplish anything but lining their pockets with handsome speaking fees, notoriety, and lucrative book deals is nothing more than a profiteer and charlatan.

The next time you see someone like that, ask yourself “what have they actually done for our movement?” Have they helped campaign for grassroots conservatives? Have they actively helped fundraise for causes and efforts that actually do something to advance liberty? Have they made an effort to lead their community by serving it first, or have they simply stirred a crowd while lining their pockets? Those who have done it know there is nothing glamorous about servant leadership. It is exhausting, often thankless, and frequently grueling work. Yet for those who are in it for the right reasons, it is a passion and a calling.

Why We Exist

Now I know what you’re thinking: “wait a minute, isn’t Ignite Liberty a business? Aren’t you trying to make money too?” Let me set the record straight. Yes, Ignite Liberty is a business, yet neither my partner or I have taken or made a dime from it. Through the generous donations of our readers we are able to cover our costs to allow us to keep doing our work, but this is not a profitable business at all. It is very much a labor of love and passion.

My partner and I didn’t start this company to get wealthy off of it. We started it to serve our community by defending the truth. We saw the imminent danger of Marxists taking over our communities from the ground level up, and decided to do something about it. We recruited and supported grassroots conservatives to run for city council and school board positions. We are actively working with conservative members of the legislature to ensure that the America First, Oklahoma First agenda is implemented in new legislation. In the coming weeks we will be launching the Liberty Business Network: Oklahoma’s first Conservative Marketplace that will bring together conservative business owners with like-minded customers (a local version of Andrew Torba’s vision of creating a conservative Christian economy).

Yet the most important work we do is to serve as a watchman, of sorts, sounding the alarm when bad actors try to infiltrate our movements, be they profiteers and shysters, lukewarm “conservatives” who lack a spine, or outright Satanists and Communists (yes, this is actually happening).

In the coming weeks and months we will be running articles exposing some of these fraudsters. Fair warning: this will make many of you uncomfortable. As always they will be well-documented and researched. Our goal is not to attack anyone, but to merely expose the truth. We are just the messenger. The fate of freedom and liberty in Oklahoma will depend upon what you do with it.

We can’t blame the Left for being, well, the Left. Darkness will always exist. It has from the Garden of Eden and it will continue to exist until the Millennial Reign of Jesus Christ on earth. The existence of the Left is not the greatest threat to liberty. The greatest threat to liberty is when those who are supposed to be salt and light refuse to be salt and light anymore. As I said when I spoke on the south steps of the Capitol in October, “the problem in Oklahoma is not the Democrats…it is the ‘conservatives’ who aren’t conservative enough, who buckle too easily under pressure.”

As Jesus said in Mathew 5:13, “But if the salt loses its savor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrownout and trampled by men.” Salt is an irritant to impurities. It stings and burns, but it also protects, preserves and purifies. If liberty is to be preserved for future generations, it is imperative that those of us who are the salt and light be the salt and light. 

If we don’t, then our grandchildren will one day ask us the terrifying question, “what was it like when America was free?”

This organization will be the salt and light for Oklahoma. We ask that you join us.

 

Op Ed

Ever since the Conservative Resurgence during the Moral Majority days of the Reagan Administration, conservatives have worked tirelessly in between election cycles to find the “perfect” candidate to support for office. If one of the perfect candidates we have chosen to represent our moral high ground suddenly appears anything less than God-like, we quickly toss him or her aside, terrified that the Democrats will use the revealed shortcomings as a weapon to defeat us. This cycle repeats itself at every level of elected government, from the White House to City Hall.

Then came Donald Trump. A man deeply flawed, twice-divorced, children by three different wives, and a known playboy of the highest sort. A crude, unpolished, morally flawed man who turned out to be the right candidate at the right time. The danger we face now is going back to the days of searching for the perfect candidate again to continue Trump’s legacy, and that would be disastrous.

My friends, the days of looking for the perfect candidate to represent us need to die…yesterday.

What matters is not someone who is still married to their high school/college sweetheart, has 2.3 children, lives in a nice neighborhood, has a perfect, successful career, and just gleams with political polish. What we need now is men and women of character…and that is often times (if not most times) found in someone other than the perfect candidate.

Character is not formed by living a perfect, safe life. The deepest character is often formed through falling flat on our face, realizing our sin, and repenting.

Proverbs 24:16 states, “For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.” The number seven is significant in the Bible. It is the number of perfection. In other words, what the Psalmist is saying here is that the righteous man perfects the art of falling. The difference is that the righteous man or woman always rises one more time than they fall. The wicked man just makes an excuse for their falling and stays down in the mud.

Romans 3:23 states that “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” 1 John 1:8 states that “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” By that standard, then, the “perfect” political candidate is flat-out lying to all of us by keeping their weaknesses hidden. 

So according to a Biblical standard of righteousness, the right candidate should be one that has perfected the art of screwing up. Who recognizes his/her deep flaws, doesn’t try to hide them, and allows God to do a restorative work in their hearts and lives. THAT is a person of character. Yet by our own pious standards, not even King David (a thief, adulterer, and murderer), the Apostle Paul (a murderer and persecutor of Christians), or about half of Jesus disciples would qualify to run for office. If that’s not hypocrisy, I don’t know what is.

We’ve seen this time and again. Both President’s Bush appeared to be the perfect conservative candidate, only to prove themselves to be globalists bent on bringing about a one world government. Barak Obama appeared to be a devoted husband and father up front, only to turn out to be the worst President this country has ever had (until the current one). Even Bill Clinton appeared to be a great guy with a great family at first, and look how THAT turned out.

The same holds true for some of our own elected officials. Senator Lankford has long appeared to be a model conservative politician, only to be found completely devoid of character and courage when the Republic depended upon him to defend it against a godless Communist overthrow. Even our own Mayor Holt appears, by all accounts, to be a great guy. Lovely family, great kids, successful career, etc.; however he has, and is, flat out selling us down the Marxist river.

If we want to have a shot at actually reclaiming the Republic that now lies in ashes at our feet, we must abandon this notion of searching for the perfect candidates to represent us, and start looking for people whose character has been forged through the Refiner’s fire, who know well the path of repentance, and who know how to get on their knees before a Holy God and ask for forgiveness.

This organization will always stand by, and defend, the candidate with the most character and the greatest amount of moral courage that is qualified for the job, regardless of their past. There are obvious exceptions for crimes of moral turpitude, because that does go to show a person’s character, but we will not summarily reject a candidate because they have a marred or checkered past.

As we saw with President Trump, they may just be the exact kind of person we need to lead us at the exact right time. If this Republic is to be saved, we must all embrace this – NOW.

Copyright, Ignite Liberty, 2021