OUR VULNERABLE AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by Lord Conrad Black [AG 13/12/21 redacted]:
Widespread concerns about American democracy are justified.
The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, the military leadership, as well as the media, the academy, Hollywood, professional sports and entertainment, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the corporate leadership are all disparaged, mistrusted, or despised by the majority of Americans. They have earned that status.
The success of Ronald Reagan was followed by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who ruled for 28 years.
This was not a time of good government. Endless, fruitless Middle Eastern wars; the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression; the ill-considered appeasement of China, Iran and North Korea were the results of this period—but only Donald Trump seemed to recognize this.
The media was as complacent as the OBushinton political class. When Trump won the 2016 presidential election, they held that he was a mortal threat to American democracy, promoting the monstrous falsehood that he had connived with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election.
Hillary Clinton, in her book about the election, stated that “Trump’s treason” was the cause of her defeat, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper publicly stated his belief that Trump was “a Russian intelligence asset” and former CIA Director John Brennan repeatedly accused Trump of treasonable activity.
Their hysterical claims incited Trump and his vast army of followers to believe that the political establishment was, in fact, the real threat to democracy.
In the pandemic, a number of swing states altered their voting rules, supposedly to facilitate voting during the pandemic, producing more than 40 million ballots that were not cast by the voters identified with them in a process called “ballot harvesting” that is impossible to verify.
There was plenty of room to question the validity of the election result as a flip of only about 53,000 votes spread between Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, would have given the election to Trump.
The media suppressed the fact that all 19 challenges to the legality of the alteration of the voting and vote counting rules (because they violated the constitutional disposition of that authority) were rejected on process grounds. Led by the Supreme Court, the entire judiciary abdicated its role as a coequal branch, judged none of these cases on its merits.
Both sides felt confirmed in their views by the invasion of the Capitol on January 6. Of course, the “insurrection” is utter nonsense.
No US prominent public institution is now sustained by an adequate level of public confidence. The political media are morally bankrupt, and the universities and schools are—to a substantial extent—promoting hatred of America. Political conditions are more dangerous than at any time since the bottom of the Great Depression 90 years ago.
