Vice-President Kamala Harris and her media lackeys repeatedly accuse former President Donald Trump of authoritarian tendencies. This is what national conservative media host Dan Bongino colorfully calls a dipsy-doo-flipperoo.
It’s a simple formula: Falsely attack your opponent for doing what you yourself intend that the voters won’t support. Democrat attacks on Trump seek to distract from their own close authoritarian embrace. Now we have new and incredibly scary hard evidence.
Evidence of the Democrats’ authoritarian tendencies are abundant. Authoritarians advance the faculties of the state at the expense of individual freedom. What happened during the pandemic? Forced school closures not to benefit the children but at the insistence of the leftist teachers’ unions. Masking and social distancing were mistakenly sold as preventative, but the Left was adamant, seeing a tool for training citizens to obey Big Brother.
And what defines the Biden-Harris administration better than the state dictating how people live? Encouraging, cajoling, and eventually forcing people to buy electric vehicles is just one example even as unsold EVs stack up on car lots.
Authoritarians actively engage in election interference. In Putin’s Russia and Maduro’s Venezuela, election interference stays old school with phony ballots and election site intimidation. Democrats do old school as evidenced by their opposition to requiring a valid ID to register to vote or to vote.
But Democrats have also grown more sophisticated. They now use the judicial system to harass, hound, and hopefully destroy their opponent. Donald Trump is no angel, but the various kangaroo trials in New York, the Georgia farce, and Jack Smith’s jokes are pure election interference.
Disinformation through the media is an authoritarians’ favorite tool, but disinformation only works if it can be propagated widely and repeated often. The mainstream media are happy to oblige which is why few people trust them anymore as evidenced by their collapsing readership and ratings.
Democrat authoritarians encourage the media to build up phony narratives and squelch inconvenient stories. Little encouragement was needed to pump the Russian collusion hoax, but Hunter Biden’s laptop would have dogged the Biden campaign in 2020 without the media’s censoring the story.
And now the clincher: In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Facebook/Meta Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits that: “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.
“Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including Covid-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
Pressuring any media to censor debate about COVID as Zuckerberg describes is despicable. It is also a classic authoritarian tactic, similar to Putin’s blocking Russian media from revealing the casualty count from his Ukrainian invasion.
Did Harris make those decisions? Surely not. But nor has she expressed regret or reservation about them. She owns these decisions as much as Biden.
No, Donald Trump is no angel, but in four years as president of the United States there is scant evidence of authoritarian governance or tendencies. Democrats, for whom absolute power disguised as benevolence is always the goal are as comfortable with authoritarianism as a child snuggling with its favorite doll. To beat Harris, Trump will need to unmask her dipsy-doo-flipperoo. It shouldn’t be too hard.
J.D. Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
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