This Is Not The America We Were Promised

posted by Kurt Schlichter at Townhall 

The events of the last few years have confirmed that we are no longer a democracy in the sense that we once thought we were – and I know we’re a republic, but follow along with me. The premise of a democracy is that individual citizens can participate in the political process by making their positions known and voting for representatives who they understand will support their views. But those components are under attack here and throughout the West. They are under attack because our garbage elite considers our participation in our own governance to be both morally illegitimate and a practical nuisance. As a result, the elite is doing everything it can to prevent us from participating in our own governance. It’s intent to make us into serfs, disarmed, disenfranchised serfs who obey in silence.

After all, when citizens participate in their own governance, they may choose policies that the elite dislikes. And the elite doesn’t like the policies normal people prefer. Part of it is profit and power, and part of it is the elite’s moral grandstanding – don’t underestimate the power of politics to make spiritually empty people such as our trash ruling class feel good about themselves. The elite don’t like competition from the peasants. It cuts into their action and is generally inconvenient.

What does the elite want? Power. It wants unquestioned power over us that is not subject to any limitations by dissent or appeals to the law. Why do you think they hate the Supreme Court so much? SCOTUS gets in their way when it enforces our rights. Why do you think they hate the Electoral College so much? Because it makes it harder for them to leverage their kept constituencies to take the presidency.

The elite wants what we’re now getting: an administrative state where experts who just happen to share all the priorities and prejudices of the elite make all the decisions. Do you wonder why the left is so concerned about controlling academia? Because that’s where experts are made, and you don’t get expert certification unless you embrace the elite’s ideology. Do you think it’s a coincidence that they’re demanding DEI loyalty oaths from graduate students and professors? You must listen to experts, they tell us, and by the way, we get to decide who the experts are. Check out conservative stalwart Ned Ryun’s new book, “American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” which I read and gave him notes on in an early draft. Ned details exactly what’s going on here – the creation of an extra-constitutional fourth branch of government that effectively disintermediates citizens from any decision-making and controls every aspect of their lives without being subjected to any sort of accountability. That is the exact opposite of democracy, but it is part and parcel of Our Democracy that the ironically named Democrats embrace. Remember that when they say “Our Democracy,” they mean “ours,” as in “theirs.” 

But it’s more than just creating formal structures to separate the people from power. The elite also takes formal and informal actions to stop people from participating in their own governance. They use formal power in formerly free places like the UK a lot, where they will put you in jail because of saying unapproved things. Their new fascist ruler, Keir Starmer, is openly celebrating how he’s releasing real criminals to make room for people who say things the regime doesn’t like. Putting aside the whole issue of why we have a special relationship with a country that differs from Putin only in the degree of repression, we need to recognize that this disgusting tyranny has happened here too. There’s a guy in jail right now for making an Internet joke about Hillary Clinton. She just advocated jailing people who spread “misinformation” – guess who gets to define that? There are hundreds of Americans being wrongfully persecuted over January 6. And they are trying to throw the man most Americans appear to want to be their next president in jail for the rest of his life on bogus charges before the biased venues when they are not trying to murder him. 

But most of what the elite does in America to silence dissent is still informal. It uses shame, coercion, and selective reporting to prevent normal people from seeing the outrages perpetrated by our garbage elite and, therefore, being outraged by them. Look at the whole Springfield eating dogs and cats thing. The elite, without the consent of the people in the community, dropped 20,000 Haitians directly from a Third World hellhole into a town of about 60,000 normal Americans. Not surprisingly, the effects were dramatic, especially when our government is directly and indirectly subsidizing these aliens. You have crime, social services stretched to the breaking point, chaotic schools, housing shortages, and unlicensed drivers smashing into people’s cars (which is a huge deal for people without a lot of money). Not surprisingly, the locals are unhappy about it. They are complaining. And, according to the elite, that must be stopped. That’s where the informal oppression comes in. First, they shame the Americans who raise their voices, calling them racist for daring to point out how their community has changed and not in ways that they like. Then pinko pastors from the pipe up about how Jesus said you’ve got to invite the whole Third World into your backyard (Spoiler: He didn’t). Then they’re called liars. Then, when they still won’t shut up, the left cites fake claims of bomb threats to invoke a heckler’s veto to silence the uppity proles – this is literally laundering foreign disinformation. 

Note that this fake concern about fake rhetoric doesn’t apply to Donald Trump, who was shot in the head a couple of months ago because of being demonized for the last eight years by these very same jerks. Oh, and then another Harris-Walz voter tried to kill him last weekend. Do not think they do not intend this foreseeable consequence of their rhetoric.

They want to put commenting on elite abuse of towns like Springfield – and all of America – off-limits. They do not care about real Americans. They hate real Americans for being uppity. Never once does the elite, through its regime media lapdogs, ever deign to explore the legitimate concerns of the people impacted by the elite’s unilateral decision to change the community overnight for the worse. They simply declare that expressing dissatisfaction with the effects of massive immigration is illegitimate. You can’t talk about it. Everything is about how if you complain, you are racist or nitpicking about whether the pet-munching migrants are eating cats or geese as if it matters. 

The objective is the same. The elite wants to make it impossible for normal people to complain and, therefore, to have the potential to assert their will. They do the same thing with parents addressing school boards about perverted books or about delusional boys pretending to be girls hanging out in the girls’ locker rooms. You’re not allowed to mention these subjects because that makes you a bad person, regardless of the merits of the objection. And that’s a problem in an actual democracy, where the right to petition for the redress of grievances is pretty central to the whole idea.

So is understanding what your elected officials stand for. After all, what’s the purpose of voting if you don’t know what the person you’re voting for actually intends to do? But this cycle, Kamala Harris has basically been an abstract art installation that everybody looks at and is supposed to get their own idea about what her policies are. The regime media certainly doesn’t press her on it. You saw the fact-checking on Donald Trump – fact-checking that was, in fact, unfactual. But where were the questions to Harris? What about the whopper that there are no Americans currently in combat zones? Nada. Zip. Nothing. The hack moderators never pressed her on it, nor did that Pennsylvania interviewer who asked her what she wanted to do about the economy ever press her when she went into a long segue about people’s lawns. You can’t have a government where the governed are expected to vote for people who never tell them what they stand for. In a truly free country, politicians must make their positions known. Here, the regime media understands that Kamala Harris has positions that are repellent to normal people, so it helps her hide them. We get vibes instead. She’s so brat, and they call anybody who objects “Hitler.”

The elite couldn’t do this without the connivance of the regime media, which is a garbage institution that we should do everything morally and legally possible to destroy. Check out the great Michael Walsh’s new book “Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You,” which has chapters by your favorite conservative thinkers like Larry O’Connor, Dr. Seb Gorka, and me. It demonstrates how the regime media is key to enforcing the informal guard rails that keep discussion firmly within the narrow confines of what the elite deems acceptable. These collaborators also hide the formal tyrannical acts of the government, and when the acts are exposed, to cheerlead for them.

So, we know what our enemy is doing. The question is whether we can do anything about it. We can. We need to understand and accept what’s happening and act accordingly. The establishment has the advantage that normal people default into thinking that everything is the same as it always was, that things are working, and that the system is functional. But none of that is true. This isn’t 20, 30, or 40 years ago when two opposing parties fought it out. Today, you have one ruling elite - which includes members of both parties – that seeks to eliminate even the possibility of opposition. The things that make a democracy a democracy – an informed populous, free speech and debate, and petitioning for the redress of grievances - are the things that are under attack. They are targeting the foundations of democracy and calling the wreckage “democracy.” 

We need to understand what is happening so we can fight it. The way we fight it is to reject their premises. Look at what JD Vance is doing. Every time he talks to the regime media – and he talks to it all the time – unlike Harris, who would get a tongue bath instead of a tongue lashing like Senator gets. JD attacks the premises of the questions and refuses to back down. He won’t apologize for standing up for the normal American citizens of Springfield. He won’t be shamed into allowing them to be treated like serfs. We must refuse to accept the regime media’s premises and ruthlessly use the power that we will take back at this election to undo the damage the elite has caused. Let them call us “unChristian.” Let them call us “racist.” Let them call us “transphobic.” Who cares what they say? It’s time to take back our power and crush them. And to do it with a smile.