by Victor Davis Hanson
A party's descent into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party.
For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.
Election Warping
Before any presidential or midterm election, strict news suppression ensures that all bad news will follow, not precede, the voting. The Twitter files, Project Veritas ambush interviews, the Podesta emails, and occasional left-wing braggadocio like Molly Ball’s now infamous post-2020 election revelations in Time magazine, confirm the fusion between the media and the Democratic Party.
To the degree there is any independent journalistic inquiry about Biden—such as we are only now seeing with Biden’s security violations—it is likely only because the party wants the 80-year-old enfeebled Biden out of office.
The Democratic-media-deep-state nexus quashed all 2020 pre-election revelations about the embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop. Its contents more or less proved that the Biden family was corrupt.
Twitter and Facebook confessionals show how, in lapdog fashion, social media forbade coverage of the truth about the laptop. More than 50 former intelligence officers, organized by the confessed liars John Brennan and James Clapper—both of whom have admitted to deceiving Congress while under oath—used their former titles to fortify the pre-election lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.
A poll conducted after the election revealed that those voters who knew of the story might have changed their vote had they known the truth. Neither Clapper nor Brennan nor any of their subordinates has ever apologized. Their lack of contriteness recalls the late Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) post-election brag about his effective pre-election lies concerning candidate Mitt Romney’s taxes: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
Joe Biden, his lawyers, and the Justice Department likely knew that Biden had violated national security laws surrounding classified documents. Yet they suppressed that information until the 2022 midterms were over. The same is true of the pre-midterm news blackout of the massive fraud of mega-Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried. In close Senate races, where Democrats often referenced the Mar-a-Lago, it might well have mattered if they were confronted with Biden’s Garage-gate scandal, and the Madoff-like albatross of the obnoxious Bankman-Fried and his enabling family.
The list of 2022 pre-election gambits is endless. Biden offered amnesties for both student-loan debt payments and federal marijuana convictions. But perhaps the most flagrant Biden pre-midterm contortion was his sudden interest in flooding markets with oil and gas, hitherto reduced in supply within the United States due to his own green handlers.
Biden requested the Saudis to postpone OPEC cutbacks until after the election. Prior to the midterms, he begged illiberal regimes like Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to pump more oil as well. They were not keen to help him out, so, in the weeks leading up to the midterms, Biden began draining millions of barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to reduce gasoline prices, even as he lied that his own policies were bringing down oil and natural gas prices. Then shortly after the midterms, Biden announced he would cease drawing down the reserve that was banked at low prices under Trump and instead would buy a few million barrels at sky-high prices.
Since the election’s conclusion, he has been silent about concerns for the voter’s gasoline and natural gas price woes. Why the change?
Projection
The Democratic Left has mastered the art of projection. Most of their own nefarious activity (now soon to be revealed) will be recalibrated as the crimes of their opponents.
Hillary Clinton used three firewalls to conceal her employment of the fabulist Christopher Steele. He, in turn, never set foot in Russia to do any research. Instead, Steele, via money from the Clinton stream, enlisted a Moscow-based Clintonite Charles Dolan and Russian Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko, either to invent fantasies, or pass on real Russian disinformation.
Clintonites in and out of government then released the resulting concocted “dossier” to the media on the eve of the 2016 election, supposedly proving that Trump was, as James Clapper would later lie again, “A Russian asset.”
In truth, Hillary was a colluding conduit for Russian disinformation and tried to warp the election by spreading Steele’s lies among top government officials to lend authority to preplanned media leaks, as the FBI deceived FISA court judges to spy on Clinton’s political opponents.
Then we come to election denialism, which began in earnest in 2000 when, almost immediately after the final Florida count, the Democratic National Committee pushed the lie that the Electoral College vote was illegitimate, and George W. Bush was “selected not elected.” In 2004 it was Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) turn. She, along with the recent chairman of the January 6 committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson (D-Miss.) and 31 other House members, voted to refuse to accept the Electoral College vote from Ohio.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton led the charge that Trump was “illegitimate” and had stolen the election. She never recanted and was soon joined by scores of Democratic officials, including perennial election-denier former President Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Her surrogates like Jill Stein sued to invalidate the election on the premise that computers were rigged, while has-been Hollywood actors peddled videos begging the electors to renounce their state popular vote tallies.
As a rule, leftists who most ardently denied the 2016 election—current House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is the most notorious example—were the most vigorous in attacking conservatives for “denying” the 2020 election.
Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election by more than 50,000 votes but who described herself as the “real” governor, created a lucrative career barnstorming the country and lecturing Democratic audiences about how “voter suppression” had “robbed” her of the governorship.
Since 2000, as a general truism, the only presidential elections Democrats did not deny were those they won.
Suppression
We now know that prominent Democrats such as Rep. Adam (D-Calif.), along with the FBI, successfully used Twitter and Facebook to ban bothersome news stories and silence political opponents. The locus classicus of such efforts was the left-wing banning of the president of the United States from social media platforms while Iranian theocrats, ISIS, and the Taliban freely used them.
The reading public is only now learning through the Twitter disclosures of the accurate Nunes House Intelligence Committee majority memo, and the utterly fraudulent Schiff minority version—truth that was self-evident, but mostly suppressed by the media.
Again, Molly Ball outlined how Silicon Valley poured hundreds of millions into selected precincts to warp the voting turnout, how it suppressed unwelcome news, how the Democratic elite modulated the 2020 violent street demonstrations to fit Biden’s advantage, and how corporate America help to fund and advance what she called variously a “cabal” and a “conspiracy.”
Changing the Rules
It is hard to determine any major constitutional norms or long-held customs and traditions the new Jacobin Party has not sought to alter or junk to its own advantage. Remember there is no consistent policy concerning any of these proposed changes. Radical demands for reforms from the Left hinge only on their perceived short-term temporary political advantage.
In the House, Democrats destroyed the old idea that the minority leader was granted his own party’s selections to serve on congressional committees simply to stack the January 6 committee. They also recalibrated congressional House subpoenas as matters of criminality and staged performance-art arrests of anyone who resisted—the antithesis to the manner in which the subpoena denier and former Attorney General Eric Holder simply ignored all summons with impunity.
Jacobins normalized the idea of impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost the House, and to conduct such a proceeding without a special counsel’s report or serious cross examinations. They also introduced the new idea of impeaching a president twice, and then once he left office to try him as a private citizen in the Senate.
Thanks to Democrats, we have a new custom of raiding a former president’s private home in search of classified presidential papers, on the allegation that said president had not yet used his legal authority to declassify them.
The Democrats predictably want to end the filibuster and destroy the Electoral College—but predicated in the former case only on whether they currently enjoy a Senate majority, and in the latter only when it lost the Electoral College vote but won the popular balloting.
The Democrats wish to bring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. into statehood. Were it a matter of adding new conservative states, and with them four additional conservative senators, they would abort the idea in its infancy.
They want to stack the court by enlarging it to 15 justices. Had any conservative voiced such “reforms” during the heyday of the Warren Court, he would have been denounced as an insurrectionist nut.
To ensure nationwide outlawing of voter IDs, Democrats tried to pass a national voting law to surpass the constitutional directive that the primary responsibility to establish voting laws remains with the states.
In just four years, the Left engineered the most radical changes in voting laws in U.S. history. The result was that in many states, under the excuse of COVID, some 70 percent of the electorate did not vote on Election Day—even as the rejection rate of improper non-Election Day balloting plunged.
The Left clamored for extended balloting because it had mastered the arts of mass-mailing absentee ballots, third-party ballot harvesting, ballot curing, and relaxing rules on authenticating addresses, and signatures, and matching ballots with registrars’ lists.
Asymmetries
One overriding principle of the new Democratic Party is asymmetry—or the notion that the Left’s moral superiority earns absolute exemption from the very methods they employ against their opponents.
Disproportionality explains why the historic Mar-a-Lago raid was constructed in bogus fashion as a legitimate search for “nuclear codes.” Yet it would have sparked outrage had the FBI, on rumors of Biden sloppiness, sent armed agents into Jill Biden’s underwear drawers looking for classified papers concerning Ukraine and Iran, or towed away Joe Biden’s Corvette to get access to a garage full of unlawfully stored classified papers, or strewn Biden’s papers across the floor for an FBI concocted photo-op.
The buffoonish protestors and rioters of January 6 were to be jailed for months without formal charges, put in solitary confinement, and often sentenced to the maximum punishment possible. But the rioters, shooters, and killers of 120 days of mayhem and violence during summer 2020 were calibrated as “summer of love” rowdies. Antifa and Black Lives Matter sort of, kind of got a little bit out of hand in torching a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C. church, as well as trying to storm the White House grounds, sending the president into an underground bunker.
That Antifa and BLM plotted much of their anarchy and violence on social media unimpeded was unremarked upon. That fact mattered not at all in comparison to the illegal paraders and rioters of January 6. Police who shoot unarmed protestors usually have their identities immediately revealed; yet when they lethally shoot the likes of an Ashli Babbitt, their identities are suppressed, and their questionable conduct lauded.
The Left destroyed the southern border to attract 5 million illegal-alien and impoverished future constituents from Mexico and former Third World Latin American and Caribbean countries. Had conservatives fast-tracked a massive legal immigration program to attract 5 million skilled and degreed immigrants from Europe or the former British commonwealth, the Left would have gone berserk in their cries of “racist,” and their current “demography is destiny” boasts suddenly would be replaced by the slur of “Great Replacement Theory.”
Donald Trump was deemed crazy. A Yale psychiatrist made the rounds on television and in Congress to claim he needed an intervention and straitjacket. The FBI and an interim attorney general discussed wearing a wire to entrap Donald Trump and convince his cabinet he was nuts. If the FBI and the Justice Department did the same to Joe Biden, the Left would have claimed a coup was in progress.
Ditto if a major former Bush official wrote, in Rosa Brooks fashion, 11 days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, that he should be removed by either the 25th Amendment, impeachment—or a military coup.
Would anything be comparable to the twisted genre of murderous fantasies among has-been politicians, Twitter creatures, and grade-C actors—competing to dream up how Biden should be torched, stabbed, decapitated, hanged, dismembered, and shot, in the manner of the four-year venom from Trump haters? Would the FBI investigate all that if there were?
What would the Left have done if a conservative version of Madonna had screamed on Inauguration Day that she dreamed of blowing up the White House, as rioters flooded D.C. streets?
Joe Biden daily forgets where he is and what he is doing. Someday historians will fault those who knowingly used a non compos mentis septuagenarian, without regard for the interests of the American people, to mask a radical neo-socialist agenda.
Biden shakes imaginary hands. He insists his son died in Iraq. In his mind, Brian Sicknick was murdered on January 6. In Walter Mitty-style, he brags that he has been a semi-truck driver, an arrested civil rights activist, a major college football prospect, a U.S. Naval Academy scholarship prospect, and on and on. If Biden was given the Montreal Cognitive Test, as was Trump, he would likely flunk it outright.
Conservatives should be aware that they are not dealing with the party of JFK and LBJ. The Democratic Party has nothing in common with the agendas of a slick Bill Clinton and is well beyond the “fundamental transformations” of arch-narcissist Barack Obama.
We are faced with a strictly disciplined, no-nonsense revolutionary party, well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans. And it feels that it has now created the means to do it.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-manic-methods-of-mad-democrats/
1 comment:
Great summary !
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