October, 2024
Recalling the MAGA attack on January 6, Biden has cast the Democratic Party as the guardians of democracy against the threat of a Trump comeback. Candidate Harris has joined the refrain by labeling the day-one dictator as a dangerous wannabe autocrat.
To this name-calling Trump could rightfully respond, "nah, nah, it takes one to know one."
It turns out that the Democrats' record of disregard for democratic principles is at least as long, though not as extreme, as Trump's. The scale of their hypocrisy makes you want to cry.
Here are just four examples of the Dems' anti-democratic escapades.
I. The Democratic National Committee's (DNC) conspiracy to sway the 2016 primaries.
After Hubert Humphrey was handpicked by Party's political elite at the disastrous Chicago convention in 1968, the party shifted to the more democratic system of open primaries. Or so it seemed.
Then, during the 2016 primaries that pitted Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks released hacked emails from the DNC. They revealed that DNC officials, including chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, conspired to sabotage Bernie's campaign. This was followed by the revelation that Grande Dame Hillary had finagled a deal that allowed her to direct the use of DNC funds.
The resulting reputational damage to Hillary and the Party may have tipped the general election to Trump. If so, it's a fitting punishment for the DNC's attempt to corrupt democracy.
II. Joe Biden sewed-up the nomination for a second term by constricting democratic choice in the primaries.
After defeating Bernie for the nomination in 2020, Biden cast himself as a bridge to a new generation of leaders. This was widely interpreted as an aspiration, if not a pledge, to forego a second term in 2024.
Actually, Joe intended to hang-on as long as he could. The bridge-image was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Bernie's young followers who wanted change (and debt relief). The prospect of new blood in 2024 might nudge them to turn out for Biden in the 2020 general election.
But by the time Biden announced his candidacy for a second term on April 25, 2023, public opinion polls strongly suggested that he was in big trouble, and he knew it. His overall job approval rating hovered around 40%. But even among Democrats, his approval had fallen from 90% to 68%.
This apparent vulnerability might temp other ambitious Democrats to seek the nomination. Biden realized that his quest for another term could succeed only if he pre-empted other heavy weights from entering the primaries.
So, like other autocrats who are dealt a bad hand, he changed the rules of the game. With the cooperation of the DNC, he reordered the dates of State primaries so that South Carolina would displace Iowa as the first contest.
Back when Iowa was first in line, candidates with limited means could test the waters, and if they won (or upstaged the incumbent) they would be catapulted to front-page news. Winning the next contest (New Hampshire) would give them 'momentum' and more favorable press.
And so it was with Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries. He crushed Biden in Iowa and again in New Hampshire. Luckily, Joe's lagging campaign was turned around by a huge win in South Carolina, and he went on to win. This risky scenario would be avoided next time around.
So, by ensuring that South Carolina would go first in the 2024 primaries, Joe deterred the emergence of serious challengers and guaranteed himself the first victory.
But Joe didn't stop there. He actually manipulated the Republican primary contest to produce the nominee he wanted to run against - Donald J. Trump. The following is a brief version of the full story:
The events of Jan 6, 2021 and the failed red wave of 2022 diminished Trump's reputation among Republicans. Polls in early 2023 revealed that a majority of rank-and-file Republicans preferred someone other than Trump as the Presidential nominee. The most popular alternative - Ron DeSantis - was running neck and neck with Trump.
This posed a serious problem for Biden: polling of likely voters showed him losing to DeSantis in the general election by 2%; but in a matchup with Trump he was ahead by 2%.
In other words, a relatively unknown challenger to the Orange Man could swing the popular vote away from Biden by 4 points, which implies that a lot of Biden's support was an artifact of voters' unique loathing of Donald Trump.
Therefore in order win the general election, Biden needed Trump to win the Republican nomination.
So, at the behest of the White House, a top lawyer from the DOJ was dispatched to the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Shortly thereafter, on March 30 2023, Bragg indicted Trump on hush-money charges involving porn-star Stormy Daniels.
This headline-grabbing indictment by a partisan Democratic prosecutor validated Trump's claim that he was a victim of political persecution. In response, the MAGA troops rallied behind their beleaguered leader. Overnight, Republicans' support for Trump soared while DeSantis' support cratered. The rest is history.
III. Determined to make good on the bribe he offered to college students during his Presidential run in 2020, imperious Joe endeavored to usurp the power of Congress, in violation of the Constitution.
Candidate Biden displayed the most shameless attempt at vote bribery. He promised student loan forgiveness of at least $10,000 across the board. The Wharton School estimated that this generous bribe would cost the public around $500 billion.
Once in office, he was urged by the Party's lefties to fulfill the promise by means of executive edict rather than going through Congress. In response, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi declared:
"People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress."
The Department of Education's General Counsel made the same determination a few months earlier.
In short, The Constitution gives the power of the purse to the democratically elected representatives in the Senate and House. The Founders believed that this would prevent the kind of self-serving despotism exhibited by Joe.
This didn't deter Joe. To energize the troops for the upcoming midterm election, he deliberately usurped the power of the Congress by issuing an executive order to cancel $10,000 of student debt.
But Pelosi was right. In June 2023, the Supreme Court declared Biden's plan unconstitutional, and quoted Pelosi in their decision.
Joe has refused to take no for an answer. He rushed to execute plan B, but that power play has been stalled by the courts, as of this writing.
IV. In the guise of protecting American democracy from disinformation in cyberspace, the Biden administration violated Americans' first Amendment free speech rights.
The Biden administration did not originate the effort to police the internet; it merely accentuated and expanded it. Years earlier both wings of the Political Establishment realized that the rise of internet was eroding their ability to curate the flow of information. The internet and social media had liberated freedom of speech. The threat to The Establishment is that "as the amount of information to the public increased, the authoritativeness of any one source decreased."
To sustain its power and legitimacy, the political establishment's voice needs to dominate.
So today, Federal agencies such as DHS, CDC and the FBI are dedicated to scouring the Web for malicious misinformation, and then "requesting" the offending platforms to take it down. (Also, gov't officials harness the news media to discredit and intimidate the perpetrators).
Biden's contribution has been to extend the dragnet to domestic sources of misinformation, especially about public health policy. Shutting down "Russian meddling" is one thing, but blocking criticism of the CDC's Covid policy is obviously problematic.
The targeting of domestic content generated two scandals for the Biden administration:
First is the blatant violation of the authors' free speech rights. In response to a suit filed by five such authors in 2023, a Federal Appeals court ruled that the White House and the Surgeon General’s office "coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences... in violation of the First Amendment.” In short, the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy were found guilty of Nazi-style suppression.
Second, lots of content censored at government request/threat was never proven to be erroneous. It was surely controversial and critical of official orthodoxy, but it was not misinformation. The most newsworthy examples of this are as follows:
The 2020 expose of Hunter Biden's laptop which threatened to taint Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg recently apologized for caving to the Biden administration's pressure to censor posts, especially the New York Post's story about the content of Hunter Biden's laptop. (Twitter's CEO issued a similar mea culpa).
Even though government requests didn't explicitly target the Post article, Federal officials made their wishes known in other ways. In meetings leading up to 2020 campaign, the FBI warned Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation about the Biden family. That why the platforms felt compelled to put a hold on the story.
In essence, the platforms were encouraged to take down content merely on suspicion, without any evidence of falsehood or duplicity. Zuckerberg conceded, “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”
The Wuhan lab-leak theory of Covid's origin.
In 2020, the official position of the CDC was that Covid-19 originated naturally, from animal to human transmission. In the authoritative opinion of Dr. Fauci, the notion that Covid-19 arose from a leak at the Wuhan lab was a "conspiracy theory" and a threat to public health. Other critics portrayed the theory as another example of Trump's racist and xenophobic attacks on China. In deference to Political Correctness, Facebook and other platforms suppressed the Wuhan thesis.
Then in 2021, the Wuhan lab-leak proponents were vindicated. The Biden administration authorized a review of the evidence which concluded that both the natural-origins and the lab-leak hypotheses were credible. On top that, scientists at the Department of Energy actually favored the Wuhan lab-leak thesis, a position that was echoed by the FBI. On May 26, 2021 Facebook announced "we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made."
The Great Barrington Declaration: a critique of Covid-19 lockdown policy.
By April 2020 lockdowns were extensive. Most cities and states had responded to Covid-19 by closing or limiting the operation of schools, bars, restaurants, theaters, gyms, shopping malls, and other settings.
In October 2020 three eminent scientists published an open letter that articulated an alternative to the massive lockdown measures advocated by Public Health Officials. The Declaration argued that the public health response to Covid should focus on preventing infection among those most likely to suffer and die (the elderly and infirm); and allow the young and healthy to go about their "business as usual."
Numerous public health organizations agreed with Dr. Fauci, that the Declaration was "total nonsense" and "very dangerous." Under pressure, the platforms suppressed it.
But, like the Wuhan lab-leak thesis, post mortem research on the effectiveness of stringent lockdown measures exonerated the Barrington Declaration. In 2022 a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis found that "...lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average."
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