The ‘save our democracy’ narrative, true or false?

Our democracy is under attack from the fringes of both parties, or so both parties tell us. “Save our democracy“, as a political message, or some version of it, is everywhere. Both Republicans and Democrats have come out strong proclaiming a ‘save our democracy’ narrative for the upcoming 2024 election season. ‘Stop the steal ‘ messaging from the Republican right has been prevalent ever since the 2020 election, and the Democrat left’s ‘insurrection’ messaging since 2021.  Former President Trump continues to push the stolen 2020 election which the media has labeled ‘the big lie’.  Hillary Clinton continues to push the stolen 2016 election lie, and, President Biden legitimizes the threat to our democracy, saying the domestic threat is more dangerous than terrorism, and declaring that it comes only from the MAGA right, while ignoring a larger threat from the Marxist left.

Here is a statement from The Washington Post 2 years ago…similar articles have been presented regularly since then…Those of us who sit up nights worrying about the next few years — not that our favored candidates might lose, but that the stage is being set for a collapse of our democracy — can easily be accused of getting too worked up. But if you look at a place such as Arizona — where the fate of U.S. democracy could well be decided — it’s hard not to feel afraid.

Former president Donald Trump went there Saturday for a rally of the faithful, and what was most disturbing wasn’t even Trump’s own litany of lies and conspiracy theories. No, what mattered about the event was the parade of Arizona politicians who came to pay tribute to him, one more extreme than the next, each there because they hope they can ride Trump’s support to their own positions of power. Amid the expected GOP congressmen and right-wing media figures was Kari Lake, the former local news anchor whose campaign for Arizona governor is based on her embrace of Trump’s election lies.

Since both sides are claiming our democracy is at stake, we have to ask, is it really?  Do both sides want to destroy our democracy?

If Biden wins in 2024, and the counting was stopped and voting delayed for a week or so in some states, to Republicans, this will be another ‘stolen’ election.   Even without convincing evidence, the circumstantial evidence, common sense reviews and conspiracy theories will still point to it. And, also, Republicans believe that the Biden Administration (and Obama Administration before) are already ‘authoritarian’ in their ideology, leadership style, policy and regulations, so democracy and freedom will be lost with Biden’s election they say.

If Trump wins the 2024 election, to Democrats, it will not be a ‘democratic’ decision. Remember, it’s only a ‘democracy’ decision when Democrats win a vote! It will have been a stolen election if a Republican wins using some vote tampering like in 2000, and probably with the help of some foreign power like in 2016 (2 of the last 3 times this century a Democrat candidate lost). It also apparently means to Democrats that ‘Hitler’ and his ‘authoritarian’ rule will have arrived in the person of Donald Trump.

Now both of these summaries are true to left & right wing devotees.  But, are they both true in reality? Yes and no.

• Will the right believe another Biden victory was a stolen election? Yes. Will the left believe another Trump victory was aided by Russia, some foreign power, or something else? Yes. This problem will be worse than 2020 and the resulting destabilization will be a threat to our country.
• Will ‘our democracy’ be at risk from victory by either side? Yes and No. Democrats say they fear the emergence of a bottom-up, state-level authoritarianism. Republicans fear the emergence of a top-down, federal-level authoritarianism.

Obviously, the ‘election integrity’ issue is real, and a clear threat to our country. It must be resolved. Though related & important, lets ignore the ‘election integrity’ issue for now, and focus on the ‘authoritarianism’ fear to ‘save our democracy‘. Is the ‘authoritarian’ threat real and properly applied?

What constitutes ‘authoritarian’, or tyrannical behavior?

From the far left-wing media outlet VOX in 2021, comes the following description of ‘authoritarians’ derived from a 2002 paper by Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and the University of Toronto’s Lucan Way. ‘Authoritarians’ “routinely abuse state resources, deny the opposition adequate media coverage, harass opposition candidates and their supporters, in some cases manipulate electoral results, [participate in government] purges, the packing of the courts and other key state institutions.“

Who does this sound like? It sounds like the Biden Administration, of course. But, Vox tries to make the case it sounds like Trump & Republicans.  To do this they use other false and misleading.narratives.

In their minds, what has Donald Trump and the GOP done to indicate they are in any way ‘authoritarian’? Democrat spin doctors double down constantly by changing the words and meaning of every comment Trump makes, and policy position Republicans take, trying to add weight to their ‘threat to democracy’ narrative. Keeping in mind Vox above authoritarian description, here some of the latest Democrat & media accussations:

• The January 6th ‘insurrection’.
  • The entire ‘save our democracy’ narrative on the left hinges on this event and narrative. Without it, they have nothing to support such a ‘threat’ claim.
  • In reality, this is an overly dramatized and erroneous description of this disheartening and embarrassing day for our country.
  • No one goes to an ‘insurrection’ without weapons, without taking hostages, and freely disengages its activities.
  • Other actions, described as peaceful protests, resemble real ‘insurrectionist’ activity.
  • The Democrat narrative about ‘saving the democracy’ from MAGA Republicans has been a growing narrative coming out of the Jan 6th riot. It started by declaring that rally was not a riot, but an ‘insurrection’, a much more serious accusation. Biden reinforced this narrative in his first SOTU address in 2022. Then the Democrats impeached Trump for inciting an ‘insurrection’. Then they indicted Trump on inciting an ‘insurrection’ (which he was never found guilty of) and trying to undo the 2020 election.  Mr. Biden is right to raise concerns about the growing threats to our democracy. He’s right that democracy requires the loser of an election to accept its outcome as legitimate. Many Democrats refused to do that in 2016 and many Republicans in 2020.
• Trump refused to accept the election results and leave the White House.
  • True, the he does not accept the results of the election.  False, because he did leave the White House on his own accord. prior to Biden’s inauguration.
• 14 Republican-controlled states have passed a total of 24 bills this year interfering with election administration.
  • After 2020 election, states wanted to shore up their election security against mail-in and other fraudulent activities.  No group was marginalized, and voting in those states increased in subsequent elections, including black and other minority populations.
• Trump has said the ‘vote counters’ are as important as the voters creating a concern for cheating at the polls.
  • after the 2020 election, Trump has been talking about the significant advantage in local voting districts the Democrats maintained from the money poured in from Zuckerberg and Bloomberg.
• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” Three GOP senators proposed a bill stripping Major League Baseball of its antitrust exemption as an explicit punishment for its decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.
  • Corporations are free to take whatever stand they desire. If they also have federal benefits provided from the same government, those benefits may be at risk.
  • This is no different than Biden providing money to schools and many other institutions that come with threats if they do not do what the government says they risk losing this money.  The choice those institutions have is to not accept the government money or benefits.
  • Clearly this is being abused by both parties.
• Racist attacks on blacks, Asians, Jews, and democrat supporters by right wing fanatics.
  • Every political group has some deranged members.
  • This primarily represent exaggerated and false flag incidents reported by the media, the volume & credibility of which is in doubt.
• Building a wall and blocking entry of refugees at the southern border is racist. He is keeping ‘children in cages’ an separating them from their parents.
  • how could he possibly hate immigrants, he married two!
  • The ‘keeping children in cages’ is a false, but still popular, narrative.
• The Muslim ban.
  • False narrative. Not a ban on Muslims, but an attempt to control terrorist entry into the country.  It was a temporary policy and Muslims from other than the targeted countries were and are welcome to enter legally.
• Trump’s “poisoning the bloodline” racist, anti-immigrant comment. Trump sounds like Hitler targeting the Jews in Nazi Germany.
  • Completely false narrative and not what he was talking about.  He meant those coming across the border, ‘trafficking in fentanyl and sex’, are poisoning and killing our kids.
  • The targeting comment is to bring alive the ongoing false narrative that he hates immigrants.(see above)
• Trump to take retribution on opponents if elected.
  • Apparently it matters not that Biden has been doing that the past 3 years.
• Trump will change all of Biden’s progress if elected.
  • Apparently it matters not that Biden did the same thing to Trump when he was inaugurated in 2021.
• The right wing Supreme Court and its decisions, particularly Hobbs regarding the abortion issue, place the government in control of a woman’s body and forcing her to give birth.
  • Hypocritical.  When the Court was majority left, all its decisions were good as far a Democrats were concerned.
  • The Court is legally in place, and its decisions legitimate, whether the left likes it or not.
  • We will not debate the Abortion issue here, but those are false and misleading narratives.  No one is forced to get pregnant.  If they do, they are asked to be responsible for their actions and not murder the developing child.

As you can see from the above, making Trump out to be a authoritarian, tyrant, or dictator does not pass the smell test.  Given he has already been President once, you saw no indication of un-Constitutional or dictatorial tendencies. Given how he has been treated during and after his presidency, he should be angry at the democrats, but nothing indicates he would suddenly become a tyrant in the current Biden mode (raiding homes and arresting people, DOJ targeting parents, declaring school protestors are domestic terrorists, …)

Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, speaking in Davos January 18, 2024 responded this way to a comment about this specific fear of Trump as dictator in a potential 2nd term. On the panel with Roberts was Wall Street Journal editor at large Gerard Baker. Bakker stated that if former President Donald Trump is elected to another term in the November election, he would be become a dictator. The Wall Street Journal editor called it a legitimate concern, saying America’s constitutional republic would be tested, but said the constitution separation of powers would prevent a dictatorship from occurring. To which Roberts responded calling the assertion  “laughable“. “The very reason I’m here in Davos is to explain to many people in this room, and who are watching, with all due respect, nothing personal, but that you are part of the problem. Political elites tell the people on three or four or five issues that the reality is X, when the fact is the reality is Y.”

Isn’t that the whole purpose of this book, what is narrative vs what is reality.

Now let’s examine some actions of the Democrats against and expanded list of ‘authoritarian’ behaviors from just the past few years.

• Free speech is limited or eliminated.
  • Freedom of speech is the heart of democracy, yet left-leaning bureaucracies colluded to influence elections by intimidating political opponents, starting with the tea party. They promoted false narratives like the Russia-collusion hoax. Federal trial and appellate courts have found that the government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social-media platforms to censor political dialogue. Mr. Biden attempted to establish a “disinformation czar” to decide what information could reach voters.
  • Activists, supporters and representatives actively target, cancel, have fired, an books, deny funding with impunity against opposition groups they wish to destroy.
  • Major League Baseball pulls the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to protest SB 202.
  • NBA Houston Rockets fires executive for criticizing China.
  • Mobs of rioters take over major cities, destroy government buildings, historic churches, statues and monuments, threaten and loot businesses, injure and murder people.
• Freedom of religion is suppressed or eliminated.
  • Freedom From Religion Foundation
  • Removal of God from schools
  • Removal of religious monuments
  • Religion violates separation of church & state
  • Churches deemed unnecessary and closed due to COVID panic
• Freedom to elect (vote) your government representatives is controlled by the federal government.
  • Democrats introduce a bill HR1 in 2021 to federalize all elections.
  • Wish to eliminate the Electoral College
  • Zuckerberg & Bloomberg donated almost a billion dollars in 2020 to install local election counting support and Democrat ballot harvesters
  • Celebrities holding up a severed head of Donald Trump, or presenting a Julius Caesar-style assassination in a play or last week discussing how getting Trump in a convertible (ala John Kennedy) would be nice.
  • Remember ‘the Resistance. The Democrats and their media allies were so shocked at Donald Trump’s Presidential victory in 2020, and remain so, that their pattern of contempt, denial, protests, marches, attacks, obstruction and panic developed its own name – ‘The Resistance‘. This organized plan began immediately after Mr. Trump’s November 8th election and continues with growing momentum throughout the left.  Mainstream Democrat politicians, media and hollywood celebrities publicly support this ‘resistance’ and even give financial support.
    • ‘The Resistance‘ was committed to do whatever it could to delay, distract, and defeat every move the Trump Administration tried to make. Since then it is committed to seeing Trump (or any other Republican who might win again). Certainly not the definition of unity, debate of the issues or compromise. More a definition of ‘mob rule’ and possibly worse. This quote is from Overthrow!, David Horowitz pamphlet about the Democrats’ assault on a duly elected president in 2016.   “It is not the proper role of an opposition party in a democracy to mount a ‘resistance’ to a duly elected government and press for its overthrow.  But, this is precisely what the Democrats are doing. For the second time in its history, the Democrat party has opted to secede from the Union. In launching their ‘resistance’, Democrats rejected the honeymoon normally afforded to incoming presidents.  Until now this tradition has functioned as something of a sacred political rite.  The presidential honeymoon is designed to reunite the contending factions as constituents of a shared constitutional republic. It ratifies the peaceful transition of power and reasserts the principle that as Americans we are one.  According to the Gallup organization, the normal duration of a presidential honeymoon has been 7 months. The Democrats did not give Trump seven seconds.  This should raise alarm bells for every American who loves his country.
    • I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration, said the leaker to the New York Times in 2019.
    • The violent nature of ‘the resistance’ was on display almost immediately, June,2017. From the college ‘snowflakes’ to the campus protestors, from the free speech deniers to the violent masked street rioters, the unbalanced left is losing it’s footing. We used to laugh at the ‘angry liberal’ as a stereotypical nuisance, but not any more. Today, at a baseball field in Alexandria, a lunatic leftist, federal law enforcement officials identified the suspected shooter as James T. Hodgkinson, 66, from Belleville, Illinois, apparently went looking for ‘Republican’ members of Congress who were practicing for a the annual Congressional baseball game.
    • Here is a running list of actions from ‘The Resistance‘, starting November 8, 2016.
  • Rep Maxine Waters (D-Ca) tells protestors in 2020 to accost republicans (and whites) in the streets, in restaurants, everywhere.
  • A deranged leftist is caught on his way to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh
  • Democrats try to disqualify Republicans politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and subpeona others like Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Ivanka Trump or the Trump sons.
  • mocrats offer a modest proposal to save democracy, January, 2020. – add 127 new states
  • a left-wing wish list of loose voting laws in Arizona fails. The measure took all the worst parts of HR 1, Democrats’ failed legislation to launch a federal takeover of elections. Without it, the state was “suppressing democracy.”
  • How does Mr. Biden explain the unprecedented acts of his agents seeking to ban challengers from the ballot? It isn’t only the brazen and unconstitutional attempt to bar Mr. Trump. Democrats have aggressively worked to ban challengers from their own primaries. They seized from Democratic voters in Iowa and New Hampshire the right to have a meaningful say in the nomination, in part for fear they wouldn’t vote for him in sufficient numbers.
• The media is controlled by the government and / or the propaganda arm of one party.
  • Twitter & Facebook during the 2020 election
  • major media outlets suppressing Hunter Biden story in 2020
  • major media outlets chasing false stories about Russia Collusion set up by the government
  • 90% of the media coverage of Donald Trump was negative during his presidency and remains so.
  • media in 2020 says Trump is the end of democracy as we know it.
  • MSNBC has refused to cover leading Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign.
  • Here is a list of media propagandists on the subject and this is a good example of media culpability, the cover of TIME magazine, May 22nd, 2017. Obvious & ridiculous.
• Threatening & punishing businesses that do not step in line with the regime.
  • Biden threatens local gas stations to drop gasoline prices in the face of nationwide inflation driving up local prices. He doesn’t have that authority.
• Education (and especially education curriculum) is controlled by the government.
  • False, anti-American curriculum developed and forced on teachers
  • cultural indoctrination with DEI, CRT, ESG…
•  Children are the responsibility of the state, not parents.
  • Democrat Governor candidate in Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, stated that education of our children is the responsibility of the state.
• Neighbors are incented to spy on neighbors and report any deviance from regime demands
  • thought police
  • disinformation board
• Anyone who has a difference of opinion with the left wing ideology will be sent to a re-education camp, assaulted, cancelled, fired, imprisoned or no longer can be found.
  • Democrat activists planned for a massive national protest (riot) if Trump won in 2020.  The same is being planned for a Trump win in 2024.  Talk about creating a fear for our democracy!
  • Whoopi Goldberg told conservatives on The VIEW, Monday, November 10, 2020, that they should put up no resistance, and to “suck it up” about Biden’s presidential win “like we sucked it up” with Trump. What? A hypocrite is defined as a person who claims or pretends to have certain beliefs about what is right, but who behaves in a way that disagrees with those beliefs; the hypocrites who criticize other people for not voting but who don’t always vote themselves. This statement by Whoopi Goldberg proves that Democrats are not only hypocrites, but they have established their own level of hypocrisy – hypoCrats!
• Government agencies (DOJ, IRS, FBI, etc) will randomly raid homes of private citizens for no reason or reasons that are in doubt.
  • FBI raids home of pro-life supporter for defending himself and his son against a pro-abortion activist.
  • FBI raids home of former President Trump for supposedly having classified documents, but not homes of President Biden and former President Obama who also have classified documents.
  • government ‘experts’ know best.
  • Fear as a weapon
• Government control of some or all of business by the state. (think Cuba, Venezuela, China, North Korea and the former USSR)
  • Healthcare, Energy, Water resources, Food, private property
  • Destroying America’s Energy Advantage To ‘Save Democracy’
  • Ideological purity required
• Elimination of private property.
  • The Great Reset
• Attacks on Capitalism
  • “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, re-imagine & reset our world”
• Anti-Constitution
  • Consider our outmoded Constitution.
  • Vaccine mandates
  • mask mandates
  • forbidding going to work
  • closing down businesses
  • closing down churches
  • threatened with prosecution for above
  • college debt relief
  • The president has opened the border and produced an illegal mass migration unprecedented in our history, while members of his party have pushed to permit foreign nationals to vote in local elections.
• Other basic institutions are under growing attack.
  • The left has been clear that it intends to pack the Supreme Court by creating new seats and the Senate by admitting the District of Columbia as a state. Less than two years ago, leftist mobs descended on the homes of justices to pressure and intimidate them. Mr. Biden’s Justice Department refused to enforce the law that protects jurists from such bullying.
  • Democrat leader of the Senate, and others, threatens the Supreme Court during a protest on the steps of the Court.
  • Texas Democrats trying to save democracy by walking out on it
• Targeting groups for oppression.
  • Jews and the state of Israel, and not stopping those who act on these deadly ideas left over from the Holocaust.
  • White people (privilege)
• Dividing the country based on proclaimed victim status.
  • Identity politics
  • Americans divided by language (Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans (AAPI), Hispanic Americans (Hispanix), etc). Unity comes from is all being AMERICANS.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes: The abject narcissism of the insular Left is startling. They apparently believe the American public is amnesiac enough to forget what leftists once did, now that they’re doing the utter opposite. And they assume we are to discount their hypocrisy and self-absorption simply because they self-identify as erudite and moral, and assume their opponents are irredeemable and deplorable. … In recent years, Democrats have rigged election laws to extend voting over an entire month, accept ballots after Election Day, allow political operatives to harvest ballots, use mail-in ballots with no chain of custody, and prevent observers from unobstructed views of ballot counting. Trump facing impeachment, subpeonas, whistleblowers, dictators and the burden of indictments is okay, but not Biden. A threat to democracy?  Unbelievable amnesia! Or, is it a political narrative in support of the political strategy?

In reality, is the ‘threat to our democracy’ from Democrats or Republicans?  Who embraces the anti-democratic ideals listed above, Democrats or Republicans? Who do these Democrat policies and threats sound like? Like every authoritarian regime in the 20th & 21st century. Are these democratic states?
– Venezuela. Under Nicolás Maduro, a country that had been one of Latin America’s wealthiest is having its democratic institutions shredded – this is what socialists (Communists) do. Venezuela’s sinister turn
– Cuba after Castro came to power. The communists in Cuba routinely expropriate the assets of foreign investors, and have seized and control everything of value, including hotels, car distributors, banks, the sugar industry, resorts
– China, after Mao came to power.
– Russia, after the Russian revolution.

– Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy

A few principles of Marxism.

• Corporations are bad
• Capitalism is bad
• Children do not belong to their parents
• Healthcare is run may the government
• Equity for all (outcomes)
• Government experts are responsible for everything.

Do you see these in the above?

Do both sides want to destroy our democracy?

Not likely. Even a civil war, which some fear, would pit two different ideologies against each other, but not two forces like Communists against Nazis, both of whose objectives are to destroy our democracy.  What we face is not ‘authoritarian’ vs ‘authoritarian’. It is democracy and freedom vs Marxism.

No Republican ever said we want to “fundamentally change this country and re-distribute its wealth“. That was Barack Obama and it is not a ‘save our democracy’ goal.  It is an ‘authoritarian’ and specifically Marxist goal, and Joe Biden is following the blueprint.

For the Democrats, the opposite of true, is still true. If pushing false narratives allows them to get political control in America, then the ends justify the means.

Which party’s plans and actions should we fear will destroy “our democracy”?  The proof is in their actions.

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