Dozens of those lined up outside the Hong Kong court where Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years on Monday had been there all night, keeping vigil. They’d camped out so as to be in position to put themselves at risk by standing with Lai, whose only crime was publishing pro-democracy journalism and then refusing to back down.

Courage is contagious, so how right Beijing is to see this 78-year-old Chinese-born UK citizen – “a man unfortunately very close to dying,” his son said on Tuesday – as a threat to lies.

In December, after a two-year show trial, he was found guilty of a conspiracy to collude with foreign forces – meeting with American officials – and a conspiracy to publish seditious materials, a.k.a. facts, in Apple Daily, the popular newspaper he founded in 1995.

“This is a dark day in Hong Kong’s history,” with dissent now treated as a serious crime, one of Lai’s lawyers, Jonathan Price, said at a Tuesday news conference via Zoom.

Press freedom is only a memory in the once-autonomous territory.

In the months before the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, there were lots of sharp divisions in the North about the proper reaction to the first seven Confederate states that had already left the Union.

Not all Unionists believed that war was inevitable. Some, in fact, were happy to be done with the departing South and thus see their stain of slavery gone from the Union.

Similarly, others agreed that the emerging Confederacy was not worth the trouble and costs of war, and the secessionists could just form their own nation and stew in their own backward, servile juice.

But after Fort Sumter, Lincoln — who was hated as much by the Confederates as Trump is by the woke and socialist left — gained a consensus that the Constitution had no clauses about any lawful departure from the union.

But it did operate under a clear supremacy clause that made state obstruction of federal law and occupation of federal property veritable sedition.

Lincoln and the preservationists felt that they easily had the moral high ground of abolition versus the continuance of slavery.

Nor did they want a North America of fragmenting, warring nations in the manner of Europe.

Something similar is emerging over Minnesota, the South Carolina of our age.

On and off this week, I have been thinking about the differences between the 59-day temper tantrums of the Occupy Wall Street “protests” back in 2011 and what we are witnessing on the Minneapolis streets today, and it struck me how much more aggressively “Alinsky” they have become.

Left-wing activist Saul Alinsky published 13 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals in 1971.

It was an instruction manual for “community organizers” conceived amid the political turbulence of the late 1960s and early 1970s, addressing a new generation of activists.

But no matter what you think about Alinsky, his rules were logical.

What we are seeing today is not.

Ronald Reagan’s famous joke comes to mind: “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” I firmly believe this is true.

They invent things. They take a factual event, add irrational emotion, and come up with the most horrific explanation possible to keep the fear, adrenaline, and anger flowing.

They tell you to move on. They tell you to accept it. They sneer that you are undermining democracy merely by demanding that democracy prove it is real.

Let us state the obvious with crystalline clarity. A republic does not endure on liturgical incantations recited by news anchors and bureaucrats.

It endures on evidence, transparency, and the immutable right of the citizen to inspect the machinery by which power is conferred.

In 2020, when tens of millions of Americans watched a presidential election mutate into an un-auditable, procedurally elastic, statistically grotesque spectacle, the response from the political class was not inquiry but suppression.Not review but reprisal. Not investigation but excommunication.

One can scarcely imagine a more brazen inversion of democratic legitimacy. Those who asked the questions were declared the enemy, while those who demanded silence were celebrated as defenders of democracy. This was not merely an election. This was a confidence heist.

Once upon a time, it was relatively easy to spot an email scam.

They were flawed. Bad grammar, broken formatting, poor spelling and typos, and a sort of odd cadence often referred to as "Engrish" exposed them for what they were: attempts to extract money from "rich" Americans, most commonly by people outside America.

Often the scams seemed reasonable, except when they weren't, as with the famous Prince of Nigeria scam: send me a couple thousand dollars so I can release my $1.7 million account, and I'll split it with you.

And for a little while they worked, until people's reason caught up with their greed.

They were profitable for scammers, who could send an email to thousands of people in hopes that maybe ten would fall for the scam. And they did. But more scammers got into the business, and as the market grew crowded, the suckers grew scarcer. The scams had to get better in order to turn a profit.

So they did.