Question for discussion: How critical is this election?

There's a current of opinion on the more thoughtful, intellectually serious conservative websites — websites like this one, for instance — there's a current of opinion that it is very critical indeed.

I am floating right along with that current. Yes, it's critical. A victory for Mrs Clinton in November would be a catastrophe for the constitutional republic. It would be a Clintocalypse.

There are two main points I'd bring forward in support of that.

Point One: the Supreme Court. The passing of Justice Scalia has of course left one seat to be filled. Assuming that whoever we elect President in November serves a full four-year term through to January 2021, on that date Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be coming up to her 88th birthday, Justice Anthony Kennedy will be 84, Stephen Breyer will be 82, Clarence Thomas will be 72.

It's not likely that all four of those justices will still be in situ four and a half years from now. The betting has to be on two or three of them stepping down. If it's three, together with Scalia's seat, a victory for Mrs Clinton in November could see four Clintonian justices on the court, caucusing with the two Social Justice Justices planted there by Barack Obama — wise Latina Sotomayor and ladies' softball champion Eleanor Kagan.

We'd then be looking at a whole generation of Social Justice rulings from the court, stretching into the 2030s and 2040s. By the end of it, what little still remains of our freedom of association would be gone, and freedom of speech would be gone with it. You think trained legal minds, flushed with power, could not come up with a constitutional justification for the suppression of "hate speech"? I bet they could — with "hate speech" of course defined to mean anything displeasing or distressing to types like Clinton, Obama, Sotomayor, and the other Clinton justices.

And don't tell me that a Clintonian replacement for Justice Ginsburg would be a wash, since Ginsburg is already as far Left as a Justice can be.

When Cultural Marxism came to full bloom in the 1970s and 1980s, Ginsburg was already middle-aged. She's an old-line New York Jewish lefty: not something I personally find simpatico, but more rational and tough-minded than the casual totalitarianism and identity narcissism of the younger Cultural Marxists. I don't like Ginsburg's politics, but she doesn't scare me.

Apparently she didn't scare Justice Scalia, either. They were good friends. I have no problem understanding that. I usually get on well with old-style lefties. They're wrong about a lot of things, of course; but they're grown-up, often very brave, and haven't altogether lost their grip on reality.

This newer generation of smiley-face ideologues who have taken over our universities and law schools do scare me. They'll bring down the temple on our heads — laughing gleefully as they do so, believing they are doing a wise and just thing.

That's Point One, the Supreme Court.

Point Two is the demographics of our nation. A defining feature of our time, noted often here on Radio Derb, is the great movements of people from failed nations and cultures in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East into the stable, comfortable, prosperous, well-governed nations of northwest Europe and the Anglosphere.

This can't end well. The numbers are potentially overwhelming. This is especially true for Africa. Steve Sailer's been promoting what he calls "The World's Most Important Graph," one showing U.N. population projections for Africa versus Europe. Europe's population is already flatlining around seven hundred million; the U.N. projection shows a slight decline to the end of the century. The projections for Africa are up, up, and up: already over a billion, two billion by 2040, three billion by 2070, over four billion at century's end.

Projections for the Middle East, South and Central America, and South Asia aren't that dramatic, but they're startling enough. Without radical changes to our immigration policies — ideally, a moratorium on further settlement and serious efforts to deport illegals — we're facing demographic revolution.

Mrs Clinton is totally happy with that. She has promised to send an "immigration reform" bill to Congress in her first 100 days. By "immigration reform" she means of course amnesty for illegals, the further throwing open of our borders, displacement of American workers by cheaper foreign hires, and more mass settlement of bogus "refugees".

Four years of further huge inflows and the rolling naturalization of illegals will put the kibosh on the U.S.A. as it was founded and developed over its first 200 years: a nation of white European settlers with a small black minority and smaller Indigenous and Asian minorities, all assimilating into Anglo-Saxon legal culture. That nation will be destroyed, replaced by a Third World model — arrogant, callous elites who feel no connection to the mass of their fellow citizens, riding herd on a polyglot mass of serfs engaged in constant tribal war for crumbs from the elite dinner-table.

Among the legacy populations of the western world there is a slow awakening to what's happening. You see this in the growing strength of nationalist parties in Europe. We saw it in the Brexit vote back in June. We're seeing it in the rise of Donald Trump.

The awakening is slow, though, and time is short. The Brexit vote was narrow; a Trump victory in November will be even narrower. The worst possible future is a too-late awakening — a realization of what should have been done, when it's too late to do it without major societal upheaval.

The old political truth stares us in the face: If essential reform can't be accomplished peacefully, it will sooner or later be carried out violently.

May we be spared from that! Let's elect Donald Trump, and do what needs to be done peacefully, constitutionally. The alternative is Clintocalypse. Yes, this is critical.