It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
Over there in the New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has headlined this:
America’s Anti-Democratic Movement
It’s making progress.
Without the least sense of irony or self-awareness, Leonhardt says the following, bold print supplied for emphasis:
American politics these days can often seem fairly normal. President Biden has had both big accomplishments and big setbacks in his first year, as is typical. In Congress, members are haggling over bills and passing some of them. At the Supreme Court, justices are hearing cases. Daily media coverage tends to reflect this apparent sense of political normalcy.
But American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.
An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported.In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.
Leonhardt, alarmed, cites several states specifically. He includes my home state of Pennsylvania, about which he says this:
Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where Trump allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.
Notice anything there? In accusing Republicans of leading an “anti-democratic movement” in Pennsylvania he uses this as evidence:
Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints.
Hello? Amending the Pennsylvania state Constitution — by democratic means — to provide for an elected — say again elected — Secretary of State as opposed to an appointed one is the very essence of democracy. It gives the power to select the Secretary of State directly to Pennsylvania voters, who will choose among candidates running for election just like the state’s governor, U.S. Senators, Congressmen, state legislators, and “row” office holders such as the state’s Attorney General, State Treasurer, and Auditor General.
Yet somehow, in the world view of New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, a free election of Pennsylvania voters for Secretary of State is “anti-democratic.”
Which is to say, his column is but the latest example of the upside down world of the American Left. Genuine democracy is now “anti-democratic.” And iron fisted authoritarianism is democratic.
My colleague Melissa Mackenzie yesterday went into considerable excellent detail about the actions of the real “anti-democratic movement” in America.
Focusing on the Nancy Pelosi hoax that is the January 6th Committee, Melissa correctly notes that “the regime persecutes enemies to cover for its own evils.” In discussing some of my efforts in this space on this subject, she gets it exactly when she says that “the scope of the gravity of what is happening almost cannot be adequately captured.”
Long before January 6, 2021, the Washington bureaucracy had set its sights on undermining the presidential campaign of a candidate they had taken it upon themselves to despise. The resources of the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice were used to undermine and harass the 2016 Trump campaign. When Trump won, the Washington Post ran this story on January 31, 2017, a mere 11 days after he was inaugurated:
Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump
The Post reported this:
But there’s another level of resistance to the new president that is less visible and potentially more troublesome to the administration: a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing any new president’s agenda.
Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make.
Got that? After Donald Trump won a democratic election, non-elected federal bureaucrats were going out of their way to undermine — to sabotage — that democratically elected president.
Now, as Melissa quite accurately says, the January 6th Committee is the latest manifestation of what effectively is the real anti-democratic movement that is at the very center of the authoritarian American Left.
Author and columnist Mollie Hemingway has further illustrated the details of that very real anti-democratic movement that is the American Left in her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Writes Mollie of the 2020 election:
Never was there such heavy-handed meddling in an election by the most powerful institutions in the country. The press brazenly concealed unfavorable news about Joe Biden and his family while continuing its long disinformation campaign against President Trump. Big Tech censored dissenters from the established narrative, while the Democratic Party manipulated a public health crisis to change the voting process in ways that left it laughably insecure.
And right there, yet again, is another vivid illustration of just who composes the very real “anti-democratic movement” that threatens America. (And as an aside? Fox Business reports that new Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is on the record saying that Twitter is “not to be bound by the First Amendment.” So much for free speech.)
Taken altogether? Add the FBI, CIA, DOJ manipulation of the 2016 election to the deliberate obstruction of an elected president by unelected Washington bureaucrats and the “heavy-handed meddling” of the 2020 election by Big Media and Big Tech to the January 6th Committee and Melissa Mackenzie’s report that “The American Spectator has exclusively learned that the January 6th Select Committee’s document production subpoenas are so broad that they want to know personal contacts, family members, private conversations, and things far outside of the scope of the events that occurred on January 6th or leading up to that point. In some cases, they’re asking for 13 months of unrelated data,” and what do we have?
What we have is the real “anti-democratic movement” in this country — all of it on the American Left. They are hell bent on remaking America as an authoritarian, decidedly anti-democratic socialist state.
Not that you’ll ever learn that from the New York Times.
