On a day when the Providence Journal has added to its complete set of endorsements of the status quo in Rhode Island and the U.S.A. and trafficked in innuendo about an insurance award Donald Trump once claimed (while still not having taken up Project Veritas’s evidence of outright illegal activity by Clinton supporters and likely her campaign and party), it’s difficult to see how any aware Rhode Islander can disagree with Kurt Schlichter that the system is most definitely rigged and we owe no acceptance or allegiance to it.  (How many Rhode Islanders agree with Schlichter but like that it’s rigged is another matter.)

Reviewing Trump’s justification for thinking the system is rigged, Schlichter mentions media bias (“an active partisan player”) first.

Then there is electoral integrity. We’ve seen numerous investigations of voter fraud and no one cares. We have one party refusing to clear voter rolls of ineligible voters, while also on a quest to ensure that no one need prove his identity to vote. Sure, Democrats have good reason to believe their voters are too lazy and/or stupid to obtain ID cards, but we all know why they really oppose voter ID: it makes it harder to cheat. And then there’s Project Veritas. We have a Democrat party operative and the husband of a sitting Democrat congressbeing caught on tape proving Democrat catspaws paid to cause violence at a Trump rally, violence which the media covered and blamed on Trump to damaging effect. And this guy went to the White House hundreds of times and frequently met with President Faily McWorsethancarter.

Hey Pearl Clutchers, read that again and tell me how this isn’t a thousand times worse than Watergate. Then tell me how this is getting only a millionth of the outrage and coverage if the system isn’t rigged.

His third point is perhaps the most salient: “the corruption of the rule of law.”  For some reason, this morning, the point that one party can expect “a weaponized FBI and DOJ” help its partisans and attack its opponents struck a chord with me.  This corruption of the rule of law seems like a distant kind of corruption that people can comfortably avoid facing, so as to avoid considering its frightening implications, but look locally, with Attorney General Peter Kilmartin.

Years after the collapse of 38 Studios, Kilmartin not only has declined to bring charges against anybody but won’t release documents from the investigation.  And as Mike Stenhouse noted in this space in August, Kilmartin is also hiding documents related to an agreement to target companies and private groups over environmental policies.  Wrote Stenhouse:

This culture of silence in the Ocean State is chilling. Why do so many elected officials and prominent people want you to be quiet? The rigged system protects the corrupt insiders. As we saw in the recent 38 Studios political whitewash, the machine will do what it takes to keep you from knowing the truth. Rhode Islanders want a government that works for everyone not just the chosen few. Things do not have to be this way in our state. We can have an open state government that serves the real needs of our families, and protects our freedom to achieve our dreams.

One really must wonder whether the Providence Journal would have endorsed Kilmartin if he’d sought a new office with the end of his term.