Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 20, 2023 4 tweets 8 min read Read on X
Trump can't be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection, says Colorado's Supreme Court. But he didn't. Jan 6 was a riot, not an insurrection. Behind the Democrats' turn against democracy is years of planning, including a secret effort to undermine the 2020 election. Image
Years Of Planning Behind Democrats’ Turn Against Democracy

War on Trump shows that the most dangerous people are often those who consider themselves incapable of evil

by @ZaidJilani & @galexybrane
Donna Brazile (left), John Podesta (center), and Rosa Brooks (right) led a 2020 scenario-planning exercise, the “Transition Integrity Project,” aimed at undermining the election.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald J. Trump cannot be on the 2024 primary ballot in the state. The Court found that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is therefore disqualified from running for president. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was originally intended to keep Confederate officials from holding office.

Yet Trump has never been criminally convicted of participating in an insurrection. Even special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Trump, chose not to indict Trump under the federal statute that criminalizes inciting an insurrection or rebellion, even though this charge was part of the referral from the January 6 committee. Smith could not build the legal case to include the charge, likely because of the First Amendment issues that would come with it.

The Colorado Supreme Court skirted both due process and First Amendment concerns and chose to equate Trump’s political speech with sedition in the American Civil War that killed over 600,000 people.

It’s true that Trump has at times adopted extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, including most recently saying that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

But one need not agree with anything Trump says to recognize that in a democratic society, voters still have a right to see him on the ballot. Over one million people voted for Trump in Colorado in 2020. What will those people think when they see that judges are essentially trying to take away their right to vote for the candidate of their choice? Will they really see themselves as included in our democracy, or will they continue to lose faith in the American political system? The answer is obvious.

Democrats’ argument that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy has little basis in reality. Trump’s election denial and machinations were not qualitatively different from the actions of many Democrats. As for the January 6 riot, it was largely the result of security failures, including leaders’ alleged refusal to call in the National Guard.

The court decision comes on the heels of years of panicked warning from Democrats and their allies that it’s Trump who seeks to end American democracy and establish a dictatorship.

In a lengthy essay for The Washington Post that quickly went viral last month, Robert Kagan argued that the United States is a “few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship” led by none other than Donald Trump.

The problem with this prediction is that we already know how Trump responds to all of these things: he was president between 2017 and 2021. When, for instance, the judiciary ruled against Trump – as it did many times during his presidency – he was more likely to send a Tweet than troops.

For instance, when a federal judge temporarily paused Trump’s travel ban targeting visitors from a range of countries in February 2017, Trump took to Twitter to lament, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned.”

At the time, Trump took heat for singling out a judge for condemnation. “The President’s attack on Judge James Robart, a Bush appointee who passed with 99 votes, shows a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the Constitution,” intoned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

But while Trump’s frequent verbal attacks on the judiciary may have been seen as impolitic by his critics, they ultimately didn’t amount to much — certainly not anything like an actual attack. Trump, throughout his presidency, ultimately preserved the separation of powers, and you could even argue that having an adversarial relationship between different branches of government and different parts of political society protects democracy rather than subverts it.

For instance, Kagan warns that “in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be ‘enemies of the state,’ the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”

But if the media’s lives were unpleasant thanks to Trump, it’s hard to detect that in their pocketbooks. Newspaper subscriptions soared under the first Trump presidency, and reporters who went out of their way to antagonize the president became instant celebrities with generous book deals.

Even when Trump did take a rare tangible step against press freedom, it didn’t amount to much. When the Trump White House temporarily suspended the press pass of a reporter who engaged in a lengthy verbal dispute with an administration staffer, the courts ruled that the reporter’s due process rights were violated. Whatever names Trump called the press, there is little evidence that he used his powers as president to suppress their critical coverage of his White House.

Meanwhile, his predecessor, Barack Obama, vigorously pursued whistleblowers with the full force of the federal government. As CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, the Obama administration “used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists . . . more than all previous administrations combined.”

One report from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard estimated that 80% of the media coverage during Trump’s first 100 days had a negative tone. That’s hardly a sign that the media was cowed by the presence of Trump in the White House, Tweets and all.

This adversarial relationship between the press and the president is good for democracy, not bad. When the media serve as handmaidens for those in power, we get less scrutiny of policies that we later come to regret – such as excessive COVID-19 policies like school shutdowns and the Iraq war.

One sign that the Republican Party would be moving in an autocratic direction would be if they stopped respecting electoral results and clung to power despite losing elections.

It is true that Trump refused to concede his own defeat, and his rhetoric helped contribute to political chaos around the election and the January 6th riot. Much of the Republican Party, too, has been reticent to admit that Trump lost that election.

But being sore losers about an election isn’t equivalent to being tyrants. Following the 2000 election, many Democrats, too, felt that Bush was unfairly made the president. Gallup polling from after that election found that “just 15% said he won fair and square.”

And, as noted above, some Democrats have similarly refused to admit defeat. While both Republicans and Democrats have a handful of gubernatorial candidates who refused to concede – Stacey Abrams in 2018 for the Democrats and Kari Lake for the Republicans in 2022 – for the most part, the parties have been proceeding as normal after defeat.

But Democrats and their allies were quick to predict that the 2022 election would produce a repeat of Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020. The Post surveyed a range of Republican candidates in battleground states about whether they’d respect the results of their election. When most of those candidates failed to respond to the paper’s questions, the Post ran the alarming headline: “Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results.”

Yet after the election came and went, every candidate except for Lake had accepted the results of their election. It turned out that it was less that the Republican Party had stopped accepting elections and more that they didn’t want to talk to the Post.

As NBC News wrote in an article shortly after the midterm election: “From Maine to Michigan, Senate to state legislature, Republican to Democrat, most high-profile candidates who fell short in the 2022 midterm elections are offering quick concessions and gracious congratulations to their opponents.”

That was a far cry from what was predicted by California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who warned in a Tweet in January 2022 that “every politician says this is the most important election of our lifetime. It may be. But it could also be the last one.”

During an appearance with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Swalwell expanded on what he meant in the Tweet. “I’m worried that if Republicans win in the midterm elections that voting as we know it in this country will be gone…if they are able to win the House, the damage they could do to permanently make it difficult to vote and to alter the way that we participate in the democratic process may be irreversible,” he said.

But Republicans did win control of the U.S. House in the 2022 election. And yet nobody thinks there won’t be another election – campaigns across the country are preparing to spend billions on it. Yet now we’re being told that maybe the next election will be the end of democracy as we know it. Why is that?Image
Please subscribe now to read the rest of this barn burner by @ZaidJilani and @galexybrane !

Image
Image
Bonus for subscribers: why Niebuhr explains what Democrats are doing.

Image

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @shellenberger

Oct 8
Fifty-five percent of people on the Left justify the murder of Trump, five times more liberals than conservatives defend political violence, and not a single high-profile Democrat has called for @jonesjay to drop out. The Left truly can not make its intentions any clearer. Image
The person whose legacy is most being destroyed by this is @BarackObama . He must demand that @jonesjay step down. Now. And he should take extraordinary efforts to demand the Left back down from its utterly crazed support for violence. This building should not open until he does that.Image
Read 5 tweets
Oct 8
Mind-blowing. In 2014, VP Biden attacked corrupt developer in Romania who owned land around US embassy. In 2015, Hunter goes to work for the corrupt developer, lobbies US ambassador to pressure Romanians to drop case, then proposes to settle case by cutting in his China client 😳 Image
This appears to have been a straight-up mob-style shakedown by the Biden family done under the auspices of Obama foreign policy and in a way the directly jeopardized US national security.
The lawyers for Hunter’s corrupt developer client first threatened to jeopardize the land upon which the embassy sat, and then proposed a deal whereby prosecutors dropped the case in exchange for the corrupt developer selling nearly half his stake to a state-owned Chinese energy company, that was also Hunter’s client.Image
Read 9 tweets
Sep 28
Good god. The Swiss people just approved digital IDs. Australia implemented them in Dec. UK last week. In all 3 nations, deep state-allied politicians are behind them. This is a digital ID/censorship emergency. Please share and reply below with info about other nations. Image
The deep state swamp creatures know that digital IDs are unpopular and so they are trying to rush them through before anyone realizes what they are doing. The good news is that the more people learn about them the more alarmed they become.

Polling in Switzerland showed 60% backed digital IDs which both houses in parliament had already approved. The final vote was just 50.4%. It almost lost. I hope the Swiss people are carefully scrutinizing the vote count.

Same dynamic in UK. Opposition to digital IDs is low and will rise. Digital IDs can and must be killed.

x.com/shellenberger/…
From a Swiss source: "Palantir and Mercator sponsored the Yes Campaign. Palantir is a member of Digital Switzerland, alongside other tech companies. Digital Switzerland lobbied for the E-ID/digital ID in Switzerland in this vote.Image
Read 10 tweets
Sep 27
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
This article in the left-wing UK magazine @NewStatesman details how Ellison bankrolled Starmer's Digital ID push.

This is not a partisan issue. Freedom lovers on the Left and Right should both aggressivley oppose digital totalitarianism.

Ellison: We need to unify all of the national data. Put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.

Blair: So you're really through the use of this, you're revolutionizing the way government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates.

Why bother having democracy at all? Why not just let Ellison and WEF and AI run things? What could possibly go wrong?
Read 7 tweets
Sep 27
And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.
Stop your creepy totalitarianism @sundarpichai @Google Image
@sundarpichai @Google UK opposition vs support of digital IDs is 45 to 42.

Opponents should be able to drive that opposition number up significantly.

It is absolutely essential that the UK kill two-tier @Keir_Starmer plan for digital IDs before they metastasize across the West. Image
Read 18 tweets
Sep 24
The idea that our rights are natural is Christian Nationalist misinformation, say the media and Democrats. But it's not. It's right there in the Declaration of Independence. Behind the Left's dehumanization of conservatives is an ignorant denial of America's spiritual foundation.
To his credit, Senator @timkaine reversed his position on natural rights a few days after the hearing. “Of course, I embrace the view, expressed so clearly in the Declaration of Independence authored by Virginian Thomas Jefferson, that all people are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I accept the Senator Kaine's change of mind, but he misrepresents the hearing by saying "Of course..."

Nobody who watches Kaine pedantically lecture State Department official Riley Barnes and walk away thinking Kaine agrees with the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Notably, Kaine placed his oped describing his change of mind on natural rights at Fox where no MSNBC viewer is at any risk of reading it.

foxnews.com/opinion/sen-ti…
@timkaine According to the New Atheists the New Atheists failed like all scientism fails. They couldn't explain reality or deliver a positive vision or affirmative program. Their entire project rests on really dumb assumptions about reality and nature.

Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(