US election 2020: Donald Trump not America’s greatest threat to democracy
While we might not know yet who will be the next US president, Wednesday revealed one thing for sure: the greatest threat to democracy, freedom, and liberty in the West is not Donald Trump.
Opinion
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While we might not know yet who will be the next US president, Wednesday revealed one thing for sure: the greatest threat to democracy, freedom, and liberty in the West is not Donald Trump.
Instead, it is the unholy alliance of Democrat party apparatchiks, activist journalists, and violent left-wing radicals who tried to stitch up the 2020 election and force ordinary Americans to shut up about it.
They, not Donald Trump, are the ones with the true born to rule mentality that believes the arc of history is on their side — and that any chicanery or bullying is OK so long as it is in the service of a progressive paradise.
They, not Donald Trump, are the reason that over the past three days I have witnessed shopkeepers across Manhattan hiring work crews to bang up plywood barricades to prevent looters from taking out their anger if the election doesn’t go the way they want.
And they, not Donald Trump, are responsible for one of the most pernicious phenomena in American society today: the “shy” voter who keeps his preference to himself not on a matter of principle, but out of a sense of fear.
Having been utterly flummoxed by 2016’s result, the Democrats thought that they had come up with a clever plan this time around — run up the early vote in key states and figure there’d be no way Trump’s supporters could catch them on election day.
This was the scheme they tried in Pennsylvania, whose Attorney-General Josh Shapiro declared on Twitter was going to fall to the Democrats.
At the same time, they decided that rather than figure out where they went wrong in attracting the votes of middle Americans, they would double down on academic Marxism, identity politics, critical race theory, “Green New Deals”, and telling Trump voters just how damn benighted and unsophisticated they were.
Yet on a four-day drive from one end of the state to the other the week before the election, it was clear that outside the Democrat cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Joe Biden and his plans to phase out fossil fuels and ban fracking was seriously on the nose.
And that’s before mentioning all that activist talk of defunding the police.
Likewise the American media and the big social media platforms, most of whom abandoned any sense of objectivity the moment Donald Trump rode down that escalator in New York to announce his first candidacy, turned from neutral brokers to propagandists.
This was seen most nakedly in Twitter’s and Facebook’s attempts to shut down the New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which implicated him and his father in a variety of foreign cash-for-influence schemes.
Or, to take another example, the way they covered the riots which began over the police killing of George Floyd and quickly descended into an orgy of lawlessness which cost billions of dollars and devastated downtowns across the country.
A stunning example of this was seen in August when CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez stood on screen in front of a neighbourhood set aflame by looters while underneath the strap read, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING”.
Seriously. No wonder the loudest chant heard at a Trump rally in Scranton just before the polls opened was “CNN sucks!”
Likely for this reason, Kenosha County, Wisconsin, where that footage was shot and which went 56 to 44 per cent for Obama in 2012 instead went two to one for Donald Trump last night.
But the most worrying aspect of what the left has been up to is the “cancel culture” which has swept academia and corporate America and has created the phenomenon of the “shy” Trump voter.
Yes, it’s absolutely correct that people be allowed to vote by secret ballot, and tell you where to go if they don’t want to tell you how they voted.
But it is another thing entirely for Americans — or anyone else — to feel that they cannot admit which candidate they are supporting because it might see them targeted.
No wonder the polls were so out once again.
The US, and the world, now faces days if not weeks of protracted counts and recounts and quite possibly court fights, particularly in Pennsylvania. This isn’t Trump’s fault.
It is instead the fault of a Democratic party that abandoned its roots and instead is now trying to transform the politics of the American republic into those of a radical university campus.
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