RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/28/our-democracy-a-deep-dive-into-democratic-weaponization-and-the-need-for-decentralization/

Reading Matt Taibbi’s summary how the Democrats weaponized the government against Donald Trump, starting before the election of 2016 and proceeding right up to the present moment, I am reminded once again that the issue is not democracy but “Our Democracy™.”

That is, the Democrats and their deep-state allies in the media and the myriad bureaucracies that actually run the country believe that democracy means “rule by Democrats.”  As Taibbi puts it, “To ‘protect democracy,’ democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.”

This is true. Hence the plethora of handwringing articles warning that Donald Trump is a “dictator”-in-waiting, a new Hitler, a refurbished Mussolini who, should he be reelected, will mobilize the military to impose his will on a hapless American populace. Taibbi quotes from a December 2023 “strategy memo” in which Biden’s puppeteers describe Trump as “an existential threat to democracy.”

It sounds absurd.  It is absurd.  But, as I and many others have pointed out, that is the story we are being asked to swallow. This is the logic:

Trump is a “threat to democracy.”

Ergo, we must use “any means necessary” to keep him off the ballot.

Otherwise, people might vote for him, and that would be “bad for democracy.”

The arrogance of this gambit is breathtaking. It assumes, with Liz Cheneyesque smugness, that ordinary people cannot be entrusted with so important a task as electing their leaders. Only anointed saviors like Liz Cheney can do that. But alongside the arrogance of the we-have-to-destroy-democracy-in-order-to-save-it mindset is the chilling revelation of the extremes to which the people in power are willing to go in order to preserve their prerogatives. They will, for example, censor any opinion they do not like as “malinformation,” i.e., an opinion that might be true but is not consistent with The Narrative. It all adds up to what I have called “the Sovietization of America.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/83-million/

Donald Trump in furor stormed out of a New York courtroom for a while, in the defamation suit brought by author and dating/boyfriend/sex-advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.

It was just settled against Trump for $83.3 million. The Carroll suit was largely subsidized by Reid Hoffman the billionaire capitalist, and mega-donor to the Democratic Party and leftwing causes.

The subtext of Trump’s rage, aside from the outrageous monetary size of the defamation ruling, is that he was facing—and angered—a leftwing claimant, a quite hostile leftwing judge, and a leftwing New York jury.

The civil suit serves as a mere preview of four additional leftwing criminal prosecutions, leftwing judges, and leftwing juries to come—all on charges that would never had been filed if Trump either had not run for president or been a liberal progressive.

Yet here we are.

The E. Jean Carroll case is the most baffling of all five. She, the alleged victim, did not remember even the year in which the purported sexual assault took place, nearly three decades ago. Observers have pointed out dozens of inconsistencies in her story.

It was never clear what were the preliminaries that supposedly (Trump denies meeting her) led both, allegedly, willingly to retreat together to a department store dressing room, where during normal business hours the alleged violence took place.

Moreover, the sexual assault complaint came forward decades post facto—and only after Trump was running for and then president.

Carroll eventually sued him for battery, but well after the statute of limitations had expired and thus the case seemed defunct.

Her claims of defamation injuries arise from being fired from her advice column job at ELLE magazine.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/29/our-nation-of-effete-status-seekers/

Bill Clinton spoke of “the right side of history” almost two dozen times while president. Some say the phrase can be traced to 1984, when race baiter and Democrat Jesse Jackson used it to describe the rise of the Marxist Sandinistas, who were destroying Nicaragua. But the expression was supercharged by Barack Obama. Since, we’ve had a deluge of status seekers eager to align themselves with The One to show they’re on “the right side of history.”

Except they’re not. But they are on the right side of inconsequence.

Americans have advanced far beyond the subsistence lives so many lived a century ago. We have become so prosperous that millions are able to spend hours on social media and taking part in marches hoping to convince as many as possible of their moral goodness.

For instance, in what other nation and at what other time could a meathead such as Rob Reiner have time to tweet a maniacal string of inanities? He’s known to reverentially reference “our democracy,” which is a factually impaired assertion and a dog whistle for progressives who’ve made a mockery of constitutional restraints; has irresponsibly accused Donald Trump of mass murder; claimed with a baseless certitude the country will survive only if “Trump, and the corrupt party he leads, is decisively defeated in 2024”; and huffed over the possibility that Elon Musk was going to reinstate Trump on Twitter, where he would “lie and spread disinformation to try to overthrow the U.S. Government to return and continue his criminal activity.”

His “signature” closing is “That’s it. That’s the tweet,” as if that somehow makes his sophomoric rants even more profound.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-our-democracy-became-undemocratic-trump-progressives-self-rule-technocracy-07962a1d?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

There are a lot of loose, baggy terms in American political discourse: “populism,” “liberalism,” “evangelical.” These words, applied with care, still have their uses. I’m not convinced the same is true of “democracy.” Maybe it’s still a noble word in some sense, but its repeated abuse over many decades has made it useless.

A democracy, when I was taught civics in the 1980s, was distinguishable from a republic. In a strict democracy, every citizen is asked to vote on every important public question. Should we raise taxes? Should we go to war with Carthage? Plebiscites on everything being impractical, the ancients invented republics, in which you vote for the people who make these decisions.

Asked what the Founders had accomplished at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin didn’t say “a democracy—if you can keep it.” Most of the Founders equated democracy with mob rule and wanted to avoid it. For a few, notably Thomas Jefferson, the word connoted self-government and decentralization of power. Andrew Jackson and his followers used it that way. Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t often use the word, treated democracy as a positive term signifying equality and self-rule.

With the rise of Progressivism at the turn of the 20th century, however, “democracy” took on meanings that had little to do with voting, elections, majorities and procedural freedoms. The activist and philosopher Jane Addams, in “Democracy and Social Ethics” (1902), defined democracy “not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.” In “Democracy and Education” (1916), the theorist John Dewey observed that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

These and many similar claims suggest that for early-20th-century Progressives “democracy” meant more or less whatever political aims Progressives thought good and desirable.