On the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, President Joe Biden and the Democrats still operate as if this one terrible afternoon is the No. 1 issue of the 2024 campaign.
In a new campaign ad, Biden proclaims, “I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency.” He says he and Vice President Kamala Harris have pushed for voting rights since Day One of the Biden administration, and “I ask every American to join me in this cause.”
Democrats pose as the guardians of democracy and smear the Republicans as pushers of autocracy. No one expects the “independent fact-checkers” to look at this Biden-Harris ad and question how their alleged stand for democracy and voting rights stands next to Biden backers trying to rip Donald Trump off primary ballots and deny any Biden-challenging Democrats access to primary ballots.
Biden and his media enablers clearly think they can acquire the votes of people disgusted by Trump’s stubborn refusal to concede defeat in 2020 (and his reluctance to stop rioting on Jan. 6) by just citing “democracy” as the all-encompassing issue that cancels all focus on their failures, from inflation to immigration. They’re clearly unwilling to hear arguments that Democrats are the ones who are carrying around the seeds of authoritarianism in their policies. Here’s a short list:
COVID Authoritarianism. Democrats suggested Trump (and Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp) were basically mass murderers because they resisted the Left’s ardor to lock everything down in 2020, from businesses to schools to churches. Firing people who wouldn’t accept a vaccine mandate wasn’t autocracy. It didn’t seem to matter that their lockdown “science” had holes, that somehow a Black Lives Matter protest couldn’t be a “super-spreader event” because it was a just cause.
Climate Authoritarianism. A global elite meets regularly to impose mandates that could dramatically affect everyday lives, starting with “ending fossil fuels.” The COVID lockdowns inspired them to see how an oppressive lockdown on allegedly catastrophic carbon emissions could be their utopian (not dystopian) vision of the future.
Student-Debt Authoritarianism. Journalists are pushing around Team Biden on how young voters think they “haven’t done enough” to unilaterally erase billions of dollars of student loan debt, ignoring any need for approval of spending by Congress or rulings from the judiciary branch. The supposedly fairness-obsessed Left never asks if this effort is unfair to the sizable minority of young people who do not go to college, or don’t incur thousands of dollars in college debt.
Gender Authoritarianism. Leftist-run fiefdoms like New York City have imposed regulations suggesting that “misgendering” or “deadnaming” an individual who identifies as transgender or nonbinary is unlawful. Newsweek reported a poll by Redfield & Wilton Strategies that found 44% of those aged 25-34 think “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense,” and that’s also supported by 38% of those aged 35-44. People must be forced to deny biological realities.
On the Left, they find it “authoritarian” to deny the right to abort a baby at any point in pregnancy, and so by their logic, killing an unborn person is less offensive than “misgendering” a person.
Anyone who thinks these notions are overwrought should be told that it’s overwrought for Biden-Harris campaigners to imply that asking voters to present a picture ID is some kind of descent into dictatorship or Jim Crow. Requiring an ID isn’t half as intrusive as mandating vaccinations. Democrats are not synonymous with democracy. Energetically arguing that they’re the party of overweening statism is not an offense against democracy. It defines democracy.
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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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Samuel Johnson, stated in 1775 that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” in response to a false patriot who supported the American Revolution. His meaning was that many political people use patriotism as an excuse for their crimes. The line is often mis-interpreted as being a denunciation of patriotism and has frequently been used by people who wish to dismiss any form of national pride.
Joe Biden and his mis-named “Democratic’ party use the word democracy like many misguided power-seeking men of Johnson’s time used patriotism, also as a diverting excuse for his family crimes. It is scoundrel joe’s last refuge of an administration that claims to promote democracy in words, but in actions does quite the extreme other, most apparently in his party’s socialist redistribution of honest American wealth in mis-named policies of “American affordable Healthcare”, that is unaffordable, un-American in medical resource redistribution by hundreds of billions to illegal aliens and financed in more debt. Don’t forget the TRILLIONS of now socialistically community reorganized from legal Americans by Taxation WITHOUT representation in inflated prices of devalued dollars, Presidential unvoted Student loan forgiveness used to buy elections, and use of government agencies to attack political Opponents. Note: Stalin’s first political party was named the Russian Social-DEMOCRATIC Workers Party.
And stop calling it a riot, it was a much justified demonstration.
VOLTAIRE
So Long as The PEOPLE Do Not Care to Exercise Their Freedom, Those Who Wish to Tyrannize Will Do SO; For Tyrants Are Active and Ardent and Devote Themselves in The Name of Any Number Of GODS, Religious and Otherwise, To Put Shackles Upon Sleeping MEN.”
“Lord, Protect Me From My FriendsI Can Take Care Of My Enemys.”
Robert Green
“The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”
James Madison
Authoritarians try telling their citizens “YOU DON’T need personal weapons to defend yourselves, THAT is our job”, THEN DEFUND THE COPS or put in place judges and DA’s who do NOTHING TO STOP CRIMINALS.
VOLTAIRE
So Long As The PEOPLE Do Not Care To Exercise THeir Freedom, Those Who Wish To Tyrannize Will Do SO;For Tyrants Are Active And Ardent. And Devote Themselves In The Name Of Any Number Of GODS, Religious And Otherwise, To Put Shackles Upon Sleeping MEN.”
“On the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol” On the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 **** mostly peaceful demonstration at the Capitol…
There fixed it for you.