The Democrat Party, Not Climate Change, Is the Existential Threat

The Biden Administration, the Democrat Party, and Democrat leaders in Congress have sponsored separate policies, laws, and initiatives that when viewed as a whole reveal one profound commonality, an intent to knock down every pillar of our free society: to sacrifice individual and parental rights; to destroy our free-market economy; to abandon our border defenses against illegal immigration, cross-border drug, sex, and arms trafficking, and terrorist infiltration; to defund the police and halt detention, prosecution, and incarceration of criminals; and to destroy the nuclear family. In short, the Democrat Party’s platform is one of nihilism.

The Democrat Party calls its suicidal ideations and policies by the collective term “transformational change,” a term Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer uses (and celebrates) almost daily. By transformational change, the Democrat Party seeks to empower and enrich those in government and those who are politically preferred and to disempower and impoverish all others. In effect, rights are deprived of protection and all social and economic opportunities are denied unless in furtherance of politically preferred objectives. In this way individual sovereignty is replaced with state sovereignty and the government becomes an ultimate master, not the intended servant of the people. All private wealth is redirected through regulation or confiscated through taxation, ultimately to afford more power and wealth to political elites and their allies.

The Democrat Party calls for a massive tax and redistribution of income from high-income earners and the middle class (that is, from the productive) to the politically preferred.

It calls for elimination of legal protections for the property and lives of individuals and the welfare of communities and states via abandonment of border defenses and of legal interdictions to stop drug, sex, and arms traffickers, gangs, and terrorists crossing our Southern border.

It calls for defunding the police (euphemistically referred to as “reimagining policing”) and cessation of law enforcement against crime, enabling violent criminals to remain on the streets incentivized to increase their criminal activity. They call for destruction of the fossil fuel backbone of the American economy, encouraging inflation but also an ultimate collapse of the economy.

They call for massive socialist spending, pumping trillions of dollars into the market, the predictable effect of which is runaway inflation. They call for official sanction of child abuse in K-12 whereby children are taught to view the absence of pigment as proof of one’s perpetual status as an oppressor and the presence of pigment as proof of one’s perpetual status as a victim (the skewed, left-eye lens of Marxist critical race theory).

They call for official sanction of even more horrific child abuse in K-12 whereby children are robbed of their innocence, sexualized prematurely, taught that they must discover their gender identity, and made to believe gender not a fact but a choice, optional and fluid, and appropriately reassigned through physical mutilation via chemical hormone suppression and surgical sex change (even to the extent of encouraging pre-pubescent youth to take hormone suppressive drugs and undergo castration or reconstructive genital surgeries without parental consent).

In short, the Democrat Party, the Biden Administration, and the Democrat Congress are at war with American liberty, American law, and American values. They have endorsed nihilism. They wish to lead Americans, as if lemmings, off the cliff of civilization into an abyss of total destruction. They plan to stand atop the ruins, all-powerful and to whom all will be dependent.

They do not support individual freedom of choice; rather, theirs is a collectivist agenda in which leaders define acceptable “rights” and insist that only those be upheld in law. They do not support freedom of speech and press; rather, they demand those who convey a conservative message be silenced in favor of an interminable liberal echo chamber where only politically preferred views may be heard. They do not support free enterprise; rather, they insist on government-planned economies where the politically preferred receive anticompetitive protection and where those in disfavored enterprise (e.g., the fossil fuel industry) are destroyed.

For the first time in American history, we have witnessed a governing party abandon all connection with that irreducible principle of our republic, the one responsible for American greatness without which we cannot be great: individual liberty. By individual liberty I mean the term as Thomas Jefferson defined it, which is the meaning understood and endorsed by all of the Founding Fathers. In his April 4, 1819 letter to the lawyer Isaac Tiffany, Jefferson explained: “Liberty . . . in the whole plenitude of its extent, . . . is unobstructed action according to our will, but rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the meaning of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”

It was to ensure broad legal protection for individual liberty that the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence and later endorsed for ratification the Constitution of the United States. It is that very liberty which has defined Americans sense of self throughout our history and has become the meaning of America understood by the world. It is the heart of our nation, and it is that very heart which the Democrat Party, this Administration, and the Democrat leaders in Congress mean to cut out from the body politic and discard forever.

Rather than talk of the rights of individuals (e.g., to dissent from officially sanctioned views on everything from racism, abortion, gender politics, religion, to COVID-19 vaccination and treatments), the Democrat Party condemns dissent, equates it with a lack of patriotism, and calls for voices of opposition to be canceled and banned from the information and idea marketplace. Facilitating this tyranny are the owners of Big Tech. So much for the adage, once celebrated by those who called themselves liberals: While I wholly disapprove of what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Instead, by word and deed, the Democrat Party has adopted politicized rather than blind justice—a political justice characteristic of totalitarian regimes in China and Russia. It does not recognize, let alone defend, individual rights unless consistent with the official orthodoxy of the party.

It rejects the foundation of American jurisprudence: equal justice under law. The “rules for thee but not for me” mentality and practice permeates the Party at all levels. Unequal justice expresses itself in, among other profound examples, rabid refusal to allow any meaningful criminal investigation into the unlawful and corrupt foreign influence peddling by the Biden family or to require criminal accountability by Hillary Clinton for violations of the Espionage Act and her campaign and agents’ financing of the fraudulent Steele dossier and false complaint to the FBI against candidate and President Trump.

While refusing to apply the law in those contexts and refusing to prosecute Antifa and BLM rioters for looting, arson, assault, battery, and murder nationwide, the Democrat Party vehemently insists on arrest, lengthy pre-trial incarceration (including in certain instances solitary confinement) and prosecution of hundreds allegedly associated with the January 6 events at the Capitol despite an absence in most cases of bona fide evidence of criminality and of criminal intent.

There is in this an assault on individual liberty, on equal justice under law, on impartial justice, and on the rule of law. It will not be enough for Republicans to take back control of the House, Senate, and White House. Once in power, they must act to restore America’s foundational principles through dismantlement of the nihilistic policies, laws, and initiatives of the Biden Administration and the Democrat Congress.

https://townhall.com/columnists/jonathanemord/2022/04/11/the-democrat-party-not-climate-change-is-the-existential-threat-n2605713

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Alternative framings of the Ukraine war

The hysteria has moved on from Covid to Ukraine. Given official and media propaganda on lockdowns and vaccines on their own people, scepticism on their trustworthiness about a foreign war waged by Russia is understandable. The mainstream media and all Western leaders have echoed President Joe Biden’s Manichean framing of the war as a ‘great battle’ between democracy and autocracy, liberty and repression and a rules-based order and ‘one governed by brute force’. President Volodymyr Zelensky has been unexpectedly heroic, courageous and inspirational. But the ‘democracy-autocracy’ narrative is seriously defective. Ukrainians are fighting for their nation, not for universal freedoms. Fragmenting Western societies seem to have forgotten patriotic determination to defend one’s country as a universal civic virtue. The same fierce resistance to invaders was demonstrated in Vietnam and Afghanistan, highlighting both the power of the weak when fighting for the homeland and the fragility of the strong when engaged in imperialism.

The 2014 Maidan revolution was a de facto coup to oust the democratically elected pro-Russian president with ‘a deep degree of US involvement’ (Washington Post) in Ukraine’s internal affairs. In the annual report from Freedom House, Ukraine’s score of 61/100 put it in the same ‘partly free’ category as Colombia, Serbia, Liberia, El Salvador and the Philippines. After the 2014 coup, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion – that’s a Daily Beast label from 2019 – was incorporated into President Petro Poroshenko’s military and security apparatus and has remained there. Zelensky has seized the opportunity of the war to ‘suspend’ eleven opposition parties, including the biggest with 44 MPs in the 450-seat parliament, and nationalise several media outlets to implement a ‘unified information policy’. In Transparency International’s 2021 corruption index published in January, Ukraine’s score was 32/100, making it Europe’s most corrupt country (cue Hunter Biden’s laptop). Russia is even worse. So pardon me for not joining in the rapturous standing ovations to Zelensky that has become part of the ritualised theatre of his Zoom addresses to Western parliaments.

Western countries have themselves witnessed grievous assaults on freedoms and curtailment of civil liberties and democratic practices in the last two years, with Canada and the state of Victoria being among the worst offenders. The media propagation of the Trump–Russia collusion hoax for three years and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, not to mention the pattern-defying anomalies, compromised the legitimacy of the 2020 US presidential election. This is not to imply a moral equivalence between imperfect Western democracies and Russia, but to explain non-Western dissent from how Biden framed the Ukraine war.

A second framing alleges Russian violations of foundational global norms on state sovereignty, territorial integrity and the use of force. The lopsided General Assembly vote, followed by this month’s suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, shows that most countries do care about core global norms and share in the repugnance at atrocities against civilians. Unfortunately, every charge levelled against Russia applies also to the US. It’s used force overseas more often than any other country since 1945, including Iraq in 2003. It rejected the World Court’s judgment on aggression against Nicaragua and threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions for daring to investigate possible war crimes by US soldiers in Afghanistan, but backs the two courts vis-à-vis Russia in Ukraine. The downing of a Malaysian Airline flight over Ukraine in 2014 is comparable to the downing of an Iran Air flight by a US warship in 1988. Both Moscow and Washington rejected the World Court’s 1996 opinion on the legal obligation on nuclear disarmament.

The first two frames together, in combination with the global dominance of Western media, explain why Westerners conflate their local consensus into a global consensus that simply doesn’t exist. Much of the non-Western world views the Ukraine conflict within a third frame of an ongoing recalibration of the European balance of power since the Cold War ended. A continual readjustment of geopolitical frontiers along historical faultlines and buffer states is part of human history. Afflicted by hubris, the US and Nato effectively treated Russia as a permanently defeated enemy instead of one in temporary retreat. As Nato kept incorporating former Warsaw Pact members in a steady eastward expansion to Russia’s borders, the repeated proclamation of red lines over Georgia and Ukraine were contemptuously brushed aside. In a cable sent home on 1 February 2008, William Burns, then ambassador to Russia and current CIA director, concluded: ‘While Russian opposition to the first round of Nato enlargement in the mid-1990s was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests’. Nato policy on Ukraine provoked but did not deter Russia. Last month, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said: ‘The war could have been avoided if Nato had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region’. This helps to explain why half of African countries refused to endorse the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Arabs too have misgivings about the consistency of US policy between Ukraine and the Middle East.

Let’s also examine the war as contestations over Russia’s place in the European security, economic and political orders. Boris Yeltsin was told in October 1993 by Secretary of State Christopher that the US was pursuing, not Nato membership for selected but a Partnership for Peace for all European countries. When Yeltsin interrupted to make sure he had understood correctly that all Central and Eastern European countries and Russia would be treated equally in an all-inclusive partnership, Christopher replied, ‘Yes, that is the case’. Yeltsin responded, ‘This is a brilliant idea, a stroke of genius’. Within a year the US changed policy. Russia was frozen out. The rest is history.

But that history has regional resonance for Europe, not global resonance. Asian countries that did not join last month’s UN condemnation of Russia include Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Singapore was the only one of the Asean ten to condemn Russia. Shivshankar Menon, India’s former National Security Adviser, writes in Foreign Affairs that the Ukraine war will transform Europe’s geopolitical landscape but is not a transcendental conflict between autocracies and democracies, will not reshape the global order and has only limited relevance for the Indo-Pacific. China’s rise is far more consequential for reconfiguring the emerging global order on both the geopolitical and normative axes than the protracted death rattles of the Soviet empire that expired in 1990/91

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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