The unprecedented fusion between the Democratic Party and corporate America bodes ill for the Jewish state as well.
U.S. President Joe Biden and the small crowd assembled on the Washington Mall for his inauguration on Wednesday celebrated the event as “democracy’s day.” But in truth, the state of democracy in America today is nothing to celebrate.
The talking heads on TV, Democrats and a smattering of anti-Trump Republicans insist that the fault for all of America’s political woes lies with former president Donald Trump and the senators and congressmen who joined him in questioning the results of the election in several swing states. For refusing to set aside evidence of widespread election fraud, they stand accused of inciting an insurrection and so endangering the foundations of American democracy.
Trump was impeached for his statements at the Jan. 6 rally, and Democrat lawmakers are calling for senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to be expelled from the Senate for questioning the electoral college votes from states with widespread allegations of election fraud.
The accusers conveniently ignore that Democrat leaders from Nancy Pelosi to Hillary Clinton have insisted since November 2016 that Trump’s electoral victory was “illegitimate” and that the job of good Americans was to “resist” his “regime.”
They ignore as well that Democrat lawmakers objected to the certification of the electoral college ballots in 2016. And when their objections failed to overturn the election results, a protest broke out in the visitors’ gallery of the Capitol. Several protesters were arrested.
No one in the media or in the coastal elite ever accused Pelosi and Clinton of inciting an insurrection, even as hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets demanding that Trump be overthrown, and dozens of well-known media, TV, Hollywood and other personalities openly called for violence and even for Trump’s assassination.
Republicans still unafraid of being called domestic terrorists and insurrectionists insist that if the violent protesters in the Capitol on Jan. 6 were insurrectionists, their “insurrection” was but a pale glimmer of the insurrection mounted in the streets of America’s cities throughout the spring and summer, with the enthusiastic support and financial backing of Democrat leaders and their corporate sponsors.
Seven hundred police officers were injured, dozens of citizens were killed and tens of thousands of businesses were destroyed and vandalized during the Antifa and BlackLivesMatter riots. Property damage and losses were assessed at $2 billion. Government buildings were besieged, burned to the ground and vandalized.
The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans are wrong. Politicians from all sides and at all levels of government have long questioned election results. And no matter how strident their rejection of the results may have been, their actions never undermined America’s democratic foundations.
Likewise, America has been the site of mass protests since before the Revolution. The right to protest is considered so sacred that it is protected in the First Amendment to the Constitution. There are laws governing where the line between protests and lawbreaking lies. And policing protests is as American as the protests themselves. Protests do not threaten American democracy.
The great danger to American democracy is not to be found in the streets. It is certainly not to be found in politicians debating how votes were counted and collected.
The grave danger to American democracy emanates from the unprecedented fusion between the Democratic Party and corporate America. Political philosopher Angelo Codevilla referred to this unity of forces as a ruling “oligarchy” that is replacing the American Republic.
The emerging “oligarchy” is currently enacting something that can rightly be dubbed “The Great Purge.”
The Great Purge, an event without precedent in American history, isn’t about one side seizing the levers of power. It is about one side denying the other side the right to even vie for power.
The purpose of purge is not to replace Trump loyalists with Biden loyalists in positions of power. Such replacement happens as a matter of course every time a new administration comes into office. The purpose of the purge is to totally “cancel” the Republican Party and its voters as a legitimate political force and so transform the United States into something approaching a one-party system.
To achieve this goal, the Democrats in government and their partners in the corporate and big tech media are using their power to repress, silence, ruin and criminalize tens of millions of private citizens for the “crime” of supporting Trump and the Republican Party.
The Big Tech giants’ coordinated cancellation of all of Trump’s social media accounts almost simultaneously was the opening gambit. That wasn’t enough, though: countless accounts belonging to Trump supporters were cancelled as well, even if they weren’t calling for “violence”.
This was rapidly followed by Congress’s light-speed impeachment of Trump for his alleged role in fomenting the violent protest at the Capitol.
Like the social media ban, the impeachment flew through with no debate, no due process and no evidence, through the good offices of Democrat lawmakers and their Republican allies who wish to make an example out of Trump.
There is every reason to believe that in the coming months and years, the members of the ruling class will continue to abuse their power to destroy Trump, whether by bankrupting him or prosecuting him. They must continue to pursue him. For if he perseveres, then they will have failed.
At some point in the near future, Trump will face a Senate trial. As he left the White House on Wednesday morning, Trump had yet to secure legal counsel for the trial. The reason he has no lawyers doesn’t owe to a sudden shortage of good defense attorneys in Washington. It owes to fear of the purge. Qualified lawyers are afraid to represent him.
And they should be.
Cleta Mitchell has long been a fixture in Washington legal circles. A senior partner at the Foley and Lardner law firm, Mitchell was a member of Trump’s legal team in his electoral challenges in Georgia. When word got out that she was representing him, Democrat operatives from the Lincoln Project began threatening her firm with a client walkout.
The day after the Lincoln Project began threatening the firm’s business, Mitchell announced her resignation. Within an hour of her announcement, all mention of Mitchell was scrubbed from the firm’s website. One of Washington’s top attorneys had been “cancelled.”
Weeks before, the Lincoln Project did the same thing to two other law firms whose partners were representing Trump’s legal challenges to the Pennsylvania election results. The attorneys saved themselves from immediate cancellation by immediately cancelling their representation of the president of the United States.
Since Jan. 6, petitions of lawyers and law students demanding that senators Cruz and Hawley be disbarred for lawfully challenging the electoral college votes of disputed states have garnered thousands of signatures. Harvard students are demanding that the university withdraw the degrees of Trump advisers and political allies.
Regular Americans who participated in the protests—outside and inside the Capitol—are also being purged. Doctors, lawyers, state lawmakers, policemen and others whose only “crime” was being present, have lost their jobs after being “outed.”
Therese Duke, a nurse’s assistant from Massachusetts, was one of those “purged.” Duke participated in a protest on Jan. 5—the night before the Capitol siege—at Freedom Plaza in Washington. She was videoed as she wept, with blood flowing down her face after being punched by a policewoman.
Duke’s daughter, a member of the “woke” revolution, outed her mother in a disgusting, leering post on Twitter.
The next day, Duke was fired from her job at University of Massachusetts Memorial Health Care. She told a local newspaper that she doesn’t believe she will be able to get another job.
And there are many, many more victims of the woke cancel culture. Victims whose careers, livelihood and reputations have been maliciously damaged and destroyed, often just for voicing opinions that didn’t conform with progressive dogma.
The cancel culture invokes dark and eerie associations with communist and fascist purges of the past, and of present dictatorships such as China, Russia or Venezuela.
As bad as things are becoming in the private sector, the smoke signals being sent out of Washington are even more alarming. Since Jan. 6, Democrat lawmakers have been preparing legislation that would apply counter-terror laws — passed to fight foreign terror groups abroad — to investigating and fighting Americans suspected of membership in “domestic terror groups.” Former military, law enforcement and intelligence leaders are pushing for such a move.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan, spent the past year campaigning against Trump. Last week McChrystal told Yahoo News, “I see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaeda in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America.”
Former CIA director John Brennan then detailed who the enemy is. Aside from Trump and “lawmakers,” Brennan said the new enemy comprises “an unholy alliance of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists and even libertarians.” This pretty much covers everyone that Brennan dislikes.
Former FBI director James Comey made the goal of the purge explicit. “The Republican Party needs to be burned down or changed,” he told The Guardian.
Burned down … He figures people would be happy to go along with that.
“Who would want to be part of an organization that at its core is built on lies and racism and know-nothingism? It’s just not a healthy political organization,” he said.
Unfortunately for Israelis, this isn’t just America’s problem. Thanks to New Hope Party chairman Gideon Sa’ar, Israel is now importing some of the instigators of the purge. Sa’ar has reportedly hired four founders of the Lincoln Project to run his campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud ahead of the March elections.
The Lincoln Project is run by former Republicans who have devoted the last four years of their lives to helping Democrats by demonizing Trump, Republicans and Republican voters. Their efforts met with negligible success in the 2020 elections. Trump increased his vote total by 11 million over 2016.
Trump didn’t lose because Republicans stopped supporting him. He lost because the Democrats massively increased their voter base. (I won’t touch the election fraud claims here). The Lincoln Project’s performance was so dismal that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that it give its outstanding funds—raised from Democrat donors—to Democrat organs that had actually won the election.
But since its election failure, the Lincoln Project has come into its own. When Ocasio-Cortez said Democrats should make a database of Trump administration officials to prepare a blacklist, she was pilloried as a totalitarian. But when the “former Republicans” from the Lincoln Project said they were compiling such a list, it went over without protest.
And ever since, the Lincoln Project has led the way in blacklisting and cancelling everyone from Trump’s attorneys to hotels and vacation websites that served Trump supporters who came to Washington on Jan. 6, intending to destroy thousands of lives. Reminiscent of how Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Castro and other dictators began their ascent, it is now also calling for the firing of everyone from a county election board chairwoman in Georgia to Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
For four years, Israelis have gasped at the similarities between the Israeli left’s unrelenting efforts to destroy Netanyahu, in partnership with the media and the legal fraternity, and the efforts of their American counterparts to destroy Trump.
Sa’ar decision to integrate the instigators of America’s great purge—a purge that is already endangering the democratic order of the most powerful democracy on earth—into Israel’s political bloodstream bodes ill for Israel’s future. And it most certainly tells us something alarming about the direction Sa’ar is interested in taking the country, if his campaign to become the next prime minister succeeds.
Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”
This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.
(JNS).