2020 has been a terrible year for human freedom.
Shocking images of Britons, Canadians and Australians arrested for violating dress codes or engaging in ordinary commerce have flooded the internet.
Bastions of freedom like France, South Korea, Israel, and New Zealand have imposed unprecedented restrictions on their citizens’ freedom of movement.
Religious practices grounded in timeless truths at odds with enlightened elite opinion stand accused of promoting anti-social behavior.
A once-robust free press has faded into a progressive propaganda machine.
Data, studies, analyses, and opinions questioning the official narrative are routinely censored or labeled "misinformation."
Anyone who notes the obvious — that progressive global elites are controlling information in ways that serve their own interests — is derided as a conspiracy theorist.
This trend is unlikely to reverse itself soon.
History teaches that power, once seized, is rarely relinquished willingly.
When the immediate viral emergency passes, others will arise.
Climate change, racial justice, and economic distribution are already jockeying for position.
On all such topics, an official consensus defines the acceptable range of discourse, opinion, and action.
The United States sits at the epicenter of this struggle.
The American Founding as a constitutional republic of free citizens provided history’s most profound exaltation of human freedom.
The revisionist assault on that freedom has now recast that founding as an expression of oppression, inequality, and injustice.
Progressive elites thus feel no affinity for the constitutional structure at the heart of America. In the past year alone, they’ve insisted that a president seeking confidential advice is obstructing Congress.
They’ve threatened judicial independence through court packing and promised to eliminate the role of states in selecting presidential electors.
Progressive governors have claimed for themselves the right to curtail legal activities they consider "non-essential."
Progressive activists call for massive restrictions on speech, religion, and individual arms.
Progressive politicians feign moderation by championing most rather than all of those infringements.
Perhaps most egregious, the progressive elite corrupted the American election system and disenfranchised the citizenry.
They changed rules without authority.
They designed a system in which more than half of all ballots circulated freely, without custodial oversight, for weeks.
They counted nearly all ballots received without applying even standard scrutiny.
The structure itself lack credibility.
It opened the door to fraud so brazen and obvious that it feels like a taunt to America; a pronouncement that none dare stop the progressive transformation.
That dare defines America’s test: Will the few American institutions — primarily courts and state legislatures — not already complicit in the farce jump on the progressive bandwagon and ratify the fraud?
Or, will they call it out and tell the American people that the leaders they’d trusted to administer a free and fair election instead disenfranchised the nation?
Only the truth can set us free — and preserve the individual freedom for which America has always stood.
The courts operate at a disadvantage. The law presumes that government actions are valid.
Courts thus place the burden of proving fraud on the victims — even when, as here, the election’s structure itself was devoid of integrity.
State Legislatures need not share that handicap.
Unlike courts, legislators can apply common sense rather than presumptions.
Common sense suggests that when rules are changed without proper authority, ballots are circulated without oversight, checks on verifiability are ignored, and reported results misalign with historical expectations, the burden belongs with those arguing that the process was conducted cleanly.
What’s more, unlike governors, secretaries of state, and other election officials, legislators are responsible only for the laws governing elections.
They need not lie to protect themselves from culpability in the disenfranchisement.
Last week, legislators in Pennsylvania began moving bravely forward, asking questions, hearing testimony, and seeking answers.
Their counterparts in other states must follow suit.
Any state legislature convinced that election officials disenfranchised their voters need not wait for the courts.
Legislators should use common sense and the best available data to discern the true will of their voters — and to ensure that those who enabled and/or perpetrated the fraud are punished rather than rewarded.
They should designate electors consistent with their discernment.
Then let the courts, Congress, and public opinion debate the propriety of their designations.
The fallout is predictable.
Progressives, who’ve been pushing states to assign electors according to the winner of the national popular vote rather than the preference of their own citizens, will suddenly scream about the legislature’s duty to follow reported results.
The complicit progressive media, acting with its characteristic lack of shame, will accuse legislators of causing a constitutional crisis — after having spent four years arguing for the need to override corrupted elections.
Yet such accusations ignore reality.
America is already in a constitutional crisis.
It arose when progressive leaders shredded the credibility of our electoral system.
Will the courts and/or legislatures rise to the challenge? That is America’s test.
The future of freedom hangs upon our performance.
Dr. Bruce Abramson is a Principal at JBB&A Strategies, a Director of the ACEK Fund, a founder of the American Restoration Institute and the author most recently of American Restoration: Winning the Second American Civil War. Read Bruce Abramson's Reports — More Here.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.