A Storm Over the American Republic
A Storm Over the American Republic
by Guy Millière for Gatestone
- The atmosphere in the United States remains poisonous. Critics claim that stoking in the public is being done on purpose — to create a false narrative that not only is Trump supposedly a “threat to democracy,” but that his more than 74 million supporters are, too. Others, however, claim that the real threat to democracy is actually these serial liars, violators of the Constitution and falsifiers of information.
- The right to challenge and criticize, which is an integral part of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, appears seriously threatened. The right to defend oneself against charges also appears threatened, and the legal profession dangerous to practice.
- Expressing doubts about the November 3 election is now a liability. Substantiated reports show that it was far from perfect. The American economist Peter Navarro, in his private capacity, drew up three meticulous analyses: “The Immaculate Deception,” “The Art of the Steal” and “The Navarro Report”. They have been zealously disparaged — many think unjustly.
- Some authors describe what is happening as a slide towards authoritarianism. They note that many Americans and corporations, while behaving in an increasingly authoritarian manner, accuse their opponents of being authoritarian — in other words, blaming their opponents for what they themselves are doing.
- For more than three years Trump was accused, without any evidence apart from a fake “dossier”, of being a Russian agent. The accusations eventually proved baseless, but not before $32 million of taxpayers’ money were spent in what the prosecutors knew from the start was a fraud. They also tried to frame, incriminate and send innocent people to prison. The exercise was, at bottom, nothing more than an attempted coup d’état.
- Throughout his entire term, Trump was faced with threats, abuse of power and unremitting attacks. Even though Trump is no longer president, the war against him continues.
- If H.R.1 becomes the law of the land, it will entrench those “very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess”. These include, among other things, the flooding of states with millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, failure to verify signatures, no chain of custody of ballots, same-day voter registration, and ballot-harvesting — many of which are invitations to commit fraud. As a bipartisan report in 2005 from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, concluded: mail-in ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” If H.R.1 is passed in the Senate, countless ways of demolishing election integrity will be set in cement.
January 20, 2021. President Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. The scene, however, is devoid of any human presence. The streets of Washington DC are empty. People had been urged to stay at home and Americans throughout the rest of the country asked not to come. The city is under the protection of 25,000 members of the National Guard, heavily armed. High barriers topped with razor wire surround the Capitol area. In the streets planned for the new president’s “parade”, barriers separate the sidewalks from the roadway. The only people visible are men in uniform carrying rifles. A day that is usually a day of celebration in the United States is, this year, strange and sad.
The explanation given by city officials and the FBI was that there was a risk of serious disruption. Other inaugurations had faced disruption, but had never placed the city under siege. On January 20, 2017, during President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, hostile protesters had come to Washington DC, burned cars and smashed windows. The police had protected the ceremony without razor wire and soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of people had cheered the new president.
This year, on January 6, responding to President Trump’s calls for a big rally, a huge crowd gathered at the Ellipse, near the White House. Most listened to Trump’s speech and returned home.
However, several thousand people went to the Capitol, a 30-minute walk away from Trump’s rally, and there a group of well-organized people smashedwindows on the Capitol and entered the building. It was not ransacked, but items were stolen. An unarmed woman was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer. Two protesters died of heart attacks. One person fell to the ground and was trampled. A member of the Capitol police died the next day, possible due to suffering a stroke.
The incident, though serious, fell far short of the scenes of looting, arson and extreme violence that had taken place in many of the country’s major cities over the entire summer. The difference was that a riot now licked at the heels of the political class, not just the rest of us.
What happened on January 6 was unanimously condemned, including by Trump himself. There was no equivalence between those who had come to listen to him and those who marauded. The former had exercised their constitutional rights of free assembly; the latter had committed criminal acts.
Police could have made arrests and justice been served. The page would have been turned. That is not what happened.
Protesters had “stormed” the Capitol several times before: on March 1, 1954, by Puerto Rican Americans who fired guns and injured five congressmen; on March 1, 1971, by members of the radical Weather Underground who placed a bomb in the building; on November 7, 1983, by a group calling itself the Armed Resistance Unit, who also placed a bomb in the building; and on October 6, 2018, by people protesting the confirmation vote of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Overlooking that, however, on January 7, President Joe Biden described the incident of the day before as a major and unprecedented “attack”:
“What we witnessed yesterday was not dissent. It was not disorder. It was not protest. It was chaos. They weren’t protesters. Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic, it’s that simple.”
The mainstream media spoke of an assault on the “citadel of democracy” and a sign that a “will to overthrow the republic” had taken shape. Trump’s supporters — as a whole — were described as dangerous people. Trump’s constitutional challenge to the result of the November 3 election had already been presented for weeks as an attempt to “overturn” the result of a perfectly irrefutable election and as a “Big Lie“. The mayhem, though vicious, was now being presented “as if the U.S. has become a war zone.”
On January 8, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, after asking President Trump to “immediately and willingly” leave office before President-elect Biden’s inauguration, launched what would be a second impeachment procedure against him. Insinuating that Trump was mentally unfit, she announced that she had spoken to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, “to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes”. Her request, which breached the chain of command, was reported as sedition. Nevertheless, on January 13, discarding all due process, the House of Representatives hastily voted on an article of impeachment accusing President Trump of “incitement to insurrection.”
President Biden, at his inauguration on January 20, while speaking of “unity”, all the same echoed the words he had used on January 7: “a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat”.
Since then, the Biden Administration has led a fight against those Biden has designated as such. “President Biden,” read a statement from the White House, “will use the National Security Council to track down and combat political extremism and domestic terrorism”.