When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.
What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then President, then ex-President, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.
The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.
In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Donald Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.
Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.
Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.
The FBI doctored evidence submitted to a FISA court. Comey leaked to the press confidential documents about his private conversations with President Trump.
Comey’s successor, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, lied on numerous occasions to federal investigators.
Both former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper repeatedly lied to the nation, saying that Trump was de facto working with the Russians.
The result? Trump lost the 2016 popular vote but still won the Electoral College.
Next, celebrities and well-funded liberals waged a media campaign to convince the electors to become “faithless.” Left-wing elites begged them to renounce their constitutional duties and instead throw the election to Hillary Clinton.
Once Trump was elected, “Russian collusion” was fired up again in hysterical fashion.
A special counsel, Robert Mueller, consumed 22 months of the Trump presidency. His investigation team constantly leaked falsehoods about the “walls closing in on” Trump.
After nearly two years, Mueller announced there was no evidence of a Trump effort to collude with Russia.
Next was the first impeachment of Trump—nearly the moment he lost the House in 2018.
Supposedly, Trump had leveraged Ukraine to investigate a corrupt Hunter Biden by delaying foreign aid.
Trump was impeached on a strictly partisan vote.
But later, no one denied that the drug-addled Hunter Biden had indeed gotten rich from Ukraine, or that Joe Biden had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his son’s misadventures while still vice president, or that Trump released all the military assistance designated by Congress, or that he included offensive weapons formerly denied Ukraine by the Obama-Biden administration.
Next, in 2020, when Hunter’s laptop turned up abandoned at a repair shop and full of incriminating evidence of more Biden family skullduggery, the left struck again.
It rounded up “51 former intelligence authorities” to mislead the American people on the eve of the vote that the laptop was likely a fake—once again cooked up by Russian disinformation experts to aid Trump.
And once more, that was another complete falsehood. But the lie proved useful to Joe Biden in the debates and campaign. And he won the election.
Next, the learn-nothing, forget-nothing left turned to the 2023-2024 campaign.
This time, their next extra-legal efforts were twofold.
One, they unsuccessfully sought to remove Trump from some 15 state ballots.
Two, local, state, and federal courts began to wage lawfare to convict and jail candidate Trump, or at least bankrupt him and keep him off the campaign trail.
Three county and state prosecutors campaigned on getting Trump on charges never filed before against a presidential candidate—and rarely against anyone else as well.
The Fani Willis Georgia lead prosecutor met secretly with the Biden White House counsel.
Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan team hired the third-ranking federal prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department.
Special counsel Jack Smith was found by a court to have been illegally appointed and much of his case was dismissed.
On July 14, a shooter nearly killed candidate Trump, nicking his ear after somehow firing a rifle from a rooftop a mere 140 yards away—while undetected by law enforcement inside the very same building below.
Prior to the shooting, Joe Biden had boasted to donors that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Biden had railed nearly nonstop that a Trump victory would spell the end of democracy—a theme the left had fueled by comparing ad nauseam Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Yet here we are in mid-July 2024 and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, is alive and leads incumbent Biden—either because of, or despite, the crude efforts to destroy him.
After nearly a decade of utter madness, can we finally order the FBI, DOJ, and CIA to butt out of our elections?
Can a bankrupt media cease whipping up hysterias about a supposed Nazi-like takeover?
Can the left stop relying on washed-up British spies, corrupt ex-spooks, and teams of clownish partisan prosecutors?
Instead, why not, at last, just let the people choose their own president?
This VDH post is a difficult one for me to comment on because for years I have had ambivalence regarding what others believe is democracy and how it relates to our unique American form of government.The very fact that one of the most ardent anti-communist authoritarians, Franco of Spain, made it clear that “people are too stupid to govern themselves”, and yet he also found it admirable to have Spain fight with Germany and Italy, as part of the Axis powers against the allies in WWII, forced me to contemplate WHY? Was it Russia’s association with the Allies? I don’t think so after reading Hayek. On the other hand America’s Founders, characterized as racists, by the neoliberal current Democrat majority, were undoubtably the most enlightened and intelligent statesmen since the advent of civilization and used their abilities to construct a government, not based on a pure democracy, but based on a Republican form of government where representatives are elected whose part time job was to legislate very little, govern even less and via that balance make certain that the unalienable Rights of Man were not trespassed upon. What are unalienable rights? The Declaration emphasizes what they are. British Common Law, and the Magna Carta, had already provided much of the reasoning that gave the hope that the American Constitutional Republic would survive and prosper despite the warning by Franklin who once answered a citizen’s question, regarding the type of government the Founders ratified. He responded with the comment "A Republic if you can keep it’. The Originalists understood the difficulties that Aristotle and Socrates struggled with that were germane to a pure democracy and the likelihood of “mob rule” on occasion. Natural God Given Rights have no chance of survival in a pure democracy which can easily be subject to the whim of an uneducated majority. Even in a Republic, which represents a two step democratic process, a majority could, and has, elected representatives who believe they have the right to ignore the Natural God Given Rights of mankind, even if the electorate objects, or allow the majority to demand and permit them to ignore the God Given Natural Rights of mankind, belonging to even a minority of one (1), and govern only, let’s say, on race and gender (DEI). America is Constitutionally lawless.
Years ago I read, and was very impressed by, a short story entitled “Under the Cherry Tree” That story made me investigate who the author was and I discovered he was a small town journalist from Kansas who ultimately became one of the most frequently read and influential people in America whose commentaries made him a sage among sages. Almost no one, today, knows who he is. This comment, which he wrote, in a March 20, 1899 editorial in the “Emporia Gazette”, caused me to ponder for years.
“Riots against the police are occurring in Havana. They will keep occurring. No Latin country governs itself. Self-government is the most difficult thing in the world for a people to accomplish. It is not a matter that a nation acquires by adopting a set of laws. Only Anglo-Saxons can govern themselves. The Cubans will need a despotic government for many years to restrain anarchy until Cuba is filled with Yankees. Uncle Sam, the First, will have to govern Cuba as Alphonso, the Thirteenth, governed it if there is any peace in the island at all. The Cubans are not and, of right, ought not to be free. To say that they are, or that they should be, is folly. Riot will follow riot. Anarchy will rise to be crushed. And unrest will prevail until the Yankee takes possession of the land. Then the Cubans will be an inferior—if not a servile—race. Then there will be peace in the land. Then will Cuba be free. It is the Anglo-Saxon’s manifest destiny to go forth in the world as a world conqueror. He will take possession of all the islands of the sea. He will exterminate the peoples he cannot subjugate. That is what fate holds for the chosen people. It is so written. Those who would protest, will find their objections overruled. It is to be”.
How is Haiti any different today from what Cuba was then? What is more significant is why America is more like Haiti today and not like the America it was in 1899? The answer is in the culture. On October 11, 1798, John Adams wrote to the Massachusetts Militia that “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”.
America can only survive if it’s population is educated to comprehend its governing documents. Our forefathers were smart and highly educated Anglo-Saxons. The document they created provides the road map for current and future civil discourse, rules for association and commerce along with the ability to pursue and use property unmolested by tyrannical elitist oligarchs who have no business using the power they were given via our Republican form of government to permit them to refuse to honor our presiding original documents.
How and why are we in this Constitutional imbroglio? Keep in mind what Adams said. And uneducated population along with open borders permitting a population far too large to immediately educate but, nevertheless, given the opportunities to vote, make Franco of Spains comments ring louder than the Bells of Liberty can ever hope to sound… now what do we do about it?
Another thought along the lines of Cuba is Libya. Qaddafi was doing quite well until Obama and Clinton interfered and ousted him, Then millions of illegals poured into Europe. Qaddafi was quite good and keeping peace and order it seems, almost on purpose, they our government leaders upset this sense of peace in an unpeaceful section of the world.
Early, yesterday evening, Van ones made the following observation on a CNN panel, “There are a lot of people who want Biden to stay in,” Jones said. “I want to just keep pointing out, there is still a grassroots love for Joe Biden. But today is a terrible day. If you pull back and look at this thing – strength versus weakness – a bullet couldn’t stop Trump, a virus just stopped Biden. You’ve got the nominees of this party getting their butts kissed. Biden’s getting his butt kicked by his own party. The Democrats are coming apart. The Republicans are coming together, that’s what’s happened. And at some point, this party has to look at the reality of that."
When this hit Mediaite, the Left Wing went ballistic and verbally pilloried Jones in every way imaginable. I won’t bore you with examples but just note the ire one incurs when daring to deviate from the accepted talking points. This touches on Professor Hanson’s theme of letting the voters decide. It is anathema to the Left for anyone to make an individual decision, much less an individual observation.
As I’ve watched the Republican Convention I pay close attention to the frequent panning shots of the crowd. Everywhere the camera scans one can find an extreme diversity of people----all of them having fun, all of them taking up unison cheers to certain lines in speeches. The other night, the Convention featured two speakers, Amber Rose and Sean O’Brien, one would not expect to see at a Republican Convention. I offer this in contrast to the two points of view exhibited by the electorate. On the Republican side there is the sense, “Okay, these people are not my cup of tea but I’m willing to listen to see what they have to say. I might even find myself agreeing with them.” The other side is not even willing to listen. More than that, the other side works to have the dissenting voices removed from the field.
Such is the choice faced by the American people this voting season. Will we stand by and let the controlling forces make our decision, or will we the people make the choice by and for ourselves? I think the controlling forces are in for a surprise.
Clinton wanted to make people believe she had the gravitas of a man or a woman such as M. Thatcher. What happened afterwards besides losing our Embassy and American lives? A caliphate was created. Qaddafi, despite the Pan Am flight was not only on our side but he used his oil revenue as a benevolent socialist that made the socialists of Europe green with envy. Qaddafi was sacrificed on an alter of propaganda.
Donald Trump was never a divider and no matter how hard the media attempts to make him so they eventually have to reengineer their efforts. Furthermore, when it takes several attempts to fix what was terribly wrong in the first place even those occupied by a distraction can’t fail to notice and draw the evident conclusions.