Threats to Democracy

When I started this blog more than 10 years ago, I was afraid I would run out of material but even local news headlines never fail to come through. Here are some from last Friday's CT Post.

Headline: 9/22/23: Primary Crisis affects all of Conn.

Like clockwork, we watch for skullduggery in Bridgeport, at every election, or at least allegations of misdeeds, and more often than not the state’s largest city comes through. Now we’re living through a repeat of the 2019 mayoral primary when a challenger to Mayor Joe Ganim won the machine vote on primary day, then lost the election due to Ganim’s superior performance in absentee ballots, then accused Ganim supporters of wrongdoing. 

Comment: The front-page lead article in last Friday’s CT Post by reporter Dan Haar indicated that election fraud has long been the norm in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city. As the headline indicated Harr ‘s concern was not just with the local Democratic primary but with its potential impact on the whole state. He believed that absentee ballot fraud would just heighten voter suspicion concerning the fairness and validity of all elections in the minds of the electorate. Moreover, he argued that Bridgeport’s absentee ballot accusations might ruin the chances of next year’s proposed referendum to provide unlimited, no-excuse absentee ballot for all.

Despite the misuse of absentee ballots, Democratic reformers just want to expand their usage. They believe that this will lead to greater voter participation and expand democracy. Reformers regard opposition to unlimited absentee voting as a threat to democracy. Bridgeport is Connecticut’s largest city with a population of about 150,000. In the last mayoral election in 2019, less than 15,000 people voted. The Democratic incumbent received 9,500 votes, twice as much as his nearest competitor, another Democrat, received. The Republican candidate got only 1583 votes. Once the incumbent won the Democratic primary, it was all over.

Most of the large cities in Blue-State Connecticut resemble Bridgeport. They are one party cities run by a political machine. If history is any guide, absentee balloting has always worked to increase their stranglehold on government. Unlimited absentee balloting will just play into their hands. Of course, when Democrats complain about election fraud, they are exercising their rights. Newspaper articles support them, and commissions are appointed to investigate. But when Republicans complain about fraud, they are considered to be threats to democracy, and they become the objects of investigation and prosecution.

Actually, the real threat to Democracy in this country can be seen in some other headlines in that same issue of the CT. Post.

 Headline 1: Suspect claims he wasn’t involved in carjacking.

“Freed on bond Thursday, a Berlin man, charged in connection with the carjacking of an Aston Martin from a Westport garage claimed his arrest had been a mistake …. Mcgill was referring to video police released to media showing two masked men, one of whom hits the owner of the luxury sports car, in the garage of the victim’s Bayberry Lane home on Sunday afternoon before driving off with the car.

McGill was arrested Monday at this Berlin home after police said they found the stolen Aston Martin in Mcgill’s garage along with a Porsche Macan GTS reported stolen in Rhode Island, a BMW X4 stolen in Ridgefield, a BMW sedan and a BMW sport utility vehicle stolen in Westport.”

Headline 2: Video shows a Fairfield business owner and customer stop car theft.

“Marc Vitaliani, the owner of the Auto Spa in Fairfield, said he and a customer foiled a brazen daytime car theft attempt last week. Vitaliani was within 10 feet of a red BMW M3, that was being detailed at the Post Road business when four people showed up in a BMW X6 and attempted to steal the vehicle… The male suspect who tried to drive off with the car was wearing a mask …"

Headline 3: 3 Bridgeport men arrested on drug, gun charges during shooting probe.

“Three city men were arrested on Sanford Avenue Tuesday night after being found with drugs and a gun according to police ….

During the interaction, [Police officer] Gilleran said, Tyree Heard, 24, was found to be in possession of illegal narcotics, packaged for sale and a .45 caliber semiautomatic handgun with a high capacity magazine. Gilleran said the firearm also has its serial number altered.”

Headline 4: Bridgeport man, 27, sentenced to over 4 years on gang-related charges.

“A city man was sentenced to over four years in prison for his involvement in a violent street gang, according to officials. …

East end gang members distributed heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and Percoset pills, used and shared firearms, and committed at least six murders and other acts of violence against rival gang members and other individuals, the release said.”

The rampant crime in our city streets is the real threat to democracy. If unchecked, it will lead to mob rule where whole neighborhoods are terrorized by gang members. Ultimately, mob rule leads to dictatorship of one form or another.

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Censorship 101

A few years ago, the Houston Astros won the American League pennant and the World Series. Baseball writers lavished praise on the effectiveness of the Houston system in producing winning teams. A couple of years later the baseball world was shocked to discover that the Astros had been cheating.

Now, fast forward to the 2020 Presidential election. The claims that President Trump has made about cheating or fraud in the election have been routinely dismissed as dubious and without evidence. Typically, news outlets do not investigate the claims but just say that they have been dismissed by judges and state officials and settle for that.

The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal agrees, even though to my knowledge, its news pages have never conducted an investigation into the voting irregularities and anomalies in the key battleground states.

However, things have gone a step further since protestors stormed the Capitol on January 6. Just talking about fraud in the past election has been elevated to speech that must be suppressed as seditious and tending to insurrection. In a recent op-ed in my local newspaper, a teacher at Connecticut’s Pace University argued that it was right and proper for social media sites to censor and suppress claims of fraud. 

Of course, he lauded the ban on President Trump’s social media accounts. He compared President Trump to Hitler claiming that he used his social media platform to advance a “Big Lie” strategy. He did believe that censorship should only be a short-term solution and argued that in the future social media and other news sources should insist that posts or tweets by politicians be accompanied by equal length contrary posts.

One wonders where the Pace prof. has been the past four years. During his term in office President Trump spawned a whole industry of fact checkers who closely scrutinized his every word. I suspect that these “fact checkers” will soon be filing unemployment claims since the new administration will likely be above reproach or criticism.

Moreover, I wonder if the professor even reads the newspaper in which his op-ed appeared. Like many other news organizations, the CT Post has a diverse group of political columnists but despite differences in color and gender they are all of the same opinion, especially when it came to the Trump administration. Even the political cartoons were invariably anti-Trump. 

Op-ed pages in newspapers were originally designed to provide opposing points of view, but no more. Over the past four years the great majority of guest opinion pieces have generally supported the paper’s editorial positions. For a while, the paper had a “You Said it” column where readers could provide short responses to editorials or generally voice their opinion. But that has largely disappeared.

The Pace prof. was just mirroring the thoughts of many Trump haters throughout the nation. He calls for reasoned discourse and the sharing of opinions but where has it been in the past four years?

Finally, have the people who believe that there is no evidence for fraud in the past election, and dismiss such claims as dubious, forgotten the claims of fraud and Russian collusion in the 2016 election? The fact that these claims were spawned by a dubious document put forward by Democratic political operatives did not stop them from calling for incessant investigation. The $40 Million Mueller investigation that ensued found no evidence to support these dubious claims. Nevertheless, many still believe that Trump stole the election of 2016. Did any professor ever speak out against this hoax or call for censorship then?

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Quote of the day: 

"Badges! We don’t need no stinkin badges!" Mexican bandit in Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Capitol Riot

  

After the violent storming of the halls of Congress this week, I decided to go to You Tube and watch President Trump’s speech to the huge crowd of protestors before the violence erupted. I may be politically naïve, but I saw no incitement to riot in the President’s remarks. He even made it a point to insist that the huge protest be peaceful. My opinion was supported by an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former assistant attorney general of the District of Columbia, who had been involved in the prosecution of a number of riot cases in the Capitol.

 

It is true that the President repeated the charges that he had made at previous rallies that fraudulent activity in key battleground states had stolen the election. He read from a teleprompter a whole litany of charges that detailed this activity. 

 

At the top of his list was the charge that a judge in Pennsylvania had unconstitutionally violated the state’s own law in allowing late ballots to be counted. His list included thousands of ballots mailed to dead voters, and thousands of ballots cast by people living out of state. There were so many more items on his list that the President feared that he would bore the crowd with the recitation. He even referred to a poll that appeared in Wisconsin on the day before the election showing him losing by 17 points, an obvious attempt at voter suppression.

 

At the end of his speech the President calmly asked the crowd to walk down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Capitol where Congress was about to count the votes of the Electoral College. It was his hope that at this late date Congress would send the votes back to the states for re-certification. He even called on Vice-President Pence to show courage and stand up for what is right. * 

 

As we all know a small minority of the protestors got out of hand, stormed the Capitol, got through police lines, and even entered the inner chambers of Congress. Inevitably, the President was blamed for inciting the riot and now members of Congress are preparing articles of Impeachment even though there are less than two weeks to go in his term. 

 

For years we have repeatedly been told that rather than blame protestors, we should try to understand the reasons for their anger and actions even when they turn violent.

 

As recently as the riots last summer in major American cities, we have been told that most of the rioters were just peaceful protestors and that the causes of their discontent were in social and economic inequality. Democratic politicians in these cities even praised and encouraged the protestors when they attacked federal and state buildings. One author even published a book entitled, “In Defense of Looting.”

 Anyway, what is the underlying reason behind the huge demonstration in Washington that unfortunately turned into violence? Thousands of people marched on Washington from all over the country. Even though the TV cameras refused to show the crowd, the President claimed it was the largest he had ever seen. Why did they come? I believe that most felt that not only had President Trump been robbed in the November election, but also that they had been robbed.

 

They had turned out in record numbers to vote for the President only to discover that their votes did not count and that they probably would never count in the future. The President had gotten 63 Million votes in 2016 and his advisors had told him that if he could get 66 Million in 2020, he would win in a landslide. He got 74 Million votes but lost because of narrow defeats in key battleground states. 

 

How could this have happened without fraud in those states? Pre-election polls showed that states like Ohio, Texas, and Florida were in 

play, but the President won easily. Ohio had been close in 2016 but the President gained an easy victory in 2020. Are suburban housewives different in Ohio than in other states? Are Blacks and Hispanics different in Cleveland than in Detroit or Milwaukee?

 

Election data analysts have noted significant irregularities and anomalies in the tabulation of votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. There were, for example, vote spikes “where a numerical amount of votes are processed in a time period that is not feasible or mechanically possible under normal circumstances.” There were massive dumps of votes in the wee hours of the morning all overwhelmingly for Joe Biden. Here is a link to a brief video on irregularities in Pennsylvania.

 

Another vote anomaly occurred in Georgia where 100000 votes could not be read by the computer and so had to be interpreted by an adjudicator to determine the intent of the voter. The process of adjudication took only one day, a physical impossibility. In other states, mail in ballots were counted as received even before they were mailed out. Democrats admit clerical errors in reporting votes, but all the clerical errors seemed to work out for Biden.

 

It is true that courts have thrown out the President’s charges of voter fraud and that media sources, even the esteemed Wall Street Journal, routinely claim there is no evidence for these charges. But do they ever investigate these charges themselves? A few years ago the Houston Astros won the World Series and sports writers were lavish in praise of the Houston system. Only later did we discover that they had cheated.

 

Efforts to suppress or ignore these stories will only lead to greater suspicion and anger. Just the other day, President Trump’s Twitter account, practically the only way, given a hostile media, that the President could communicate with the American people, was banned. Is that any way to make people less suspicious or angry?

 

It is true that the web is full of conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, suppression or censorship of unfavorable ideas has become so prevalent that it is no wonder that people are suspicions, and even angry. 

 

Democratic politicians and their allies in the media have incessantly attacked the President even before his inauguration in 2016. They have even refused to call him President and still claim that his victory was fraudulent and that his presidency was illegitimate. Many of them still believe the conspiracy theories about Russian collusion for which the Mueller and other investigations could find no evidence.

 

The opposition to President Trump, often bordering on hysteria and hatred, bears much of the responsibility for last week’s riot.

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 *Note: I do fault the President for calling our Vice-President Pence in his remarks. It is inconceivable that he had not discussed the matter with the VP privately, and so he must have known what he intended to do. The Vice-President’s opinion of his role in the counting of Electoral College vote count was also featured in the op-ed section of the WSJ.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m shocked! Shocked. Claude Rains in Casablanca.