A president for all Americans who think like him

Fears for freedom and justice under a Democrat administration are already proving justified

Melanie Phillips

Even before the transfer of power in America due on January 20, it’s already horribly clear that fears for the future of freedom and justice under a Democrat administration, with the broader forces of the left now unconstrained, are justified.

Most attention is understandably being directed at the clampdown on free speech by big tech after last week’s Capitol riot, and on the determination of Speaker Nancy Pelosi et al to impeach President Trump for a second time over his behaviour on that awful day.

We can already see that it’s not just Trump who is in the sights of the Democrats and the oligarchs of the left. It is also conservatives in general, the police, the US constitution and the indivisible principles of freedom, justice and equality.

President-elect Joe Biden’s statement after the storming of the Capitol was a shocking indication of how this is going to play out. With a police officer having been killed in the riot, and with graphic evidence of the onslaught on the wholly outnumbered and inadequate police force (another story), Biden actually accused the police of being soft on the rioters and, quite incredibly, accused them of racial discrimination.

Referring to a text conversation he’d had with his grand-daughter, comparing how law enforcement officers were treating the Capitol rioters with the way in which Black Lives Matters activists had been treated during last year’s demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, Biden said:

She sent me a photo of military people in full military gear. Scores of them lining the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Because of protests by Black Lives Matter. She said, “Pop. This isn’t fair.”

No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently from the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol. We all know that’s true. And it’s unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.

Quite apart from the slander against the Capitol police force which had been unprepared and ill-equipped to defend itself against murderous attack, the hypocrisy of this attempt to racialise disorder is astounding. During long periods last year, a number of American cities were subjected to anarchic rioting, arson, assaults and the attempted exclusion of the police, perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the name of “anti-racism”.  In Portland, Oregon alone, more than 277 police officer injuries were reported by the Department of Homeland Security, and hundreds of further police injuries were reported in other cities.

Yet despite the violence and the fact that BLM is a racially bigoted, antisemitic outfit pledged to the revolutionary overthrow of white society, the nuclear family and capitalism, Democrat politicians supported these insurgents. As Andy Ngo, the reporter who closely followed these riots, has written:

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris encouraged her millions of Twitter followers to donate to a Minnesota crowd-funding effort that paid bail for accused rioters. So, too, did more than a dozen Joe Biden campaign staffers.

… Local politicians at the time condemned law enforcement and lionised the criminals. Portland city councilwoman Jo Ann Hardesty spread a conspiracy theory that police were engaging in false-flag arson attacks to frame left-wing protesters. Mayor Ted Wheeler told President Trump in a news conference to take his “troops” and leave. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden called the officers an “occupying army.” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown described them as “secret police abducting people in unmarked vehicles.”

The BLM agenda promulgates the orthodoxy on the left that white society is inherently racist and that any disadvantages suffered by ethnic minorities are the fault of “white privilege”. Now Biden has indicated that his presidency will institutionalise this distorted BLM thinking. On Friday, he announced that his proposed trillion-dollar Covid-19 relief package would discriminate in favour of ethic minorities. He said:

Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild.

He is thus pledging to discriminate against white small-business owners who equally need such Covid relief — and then has the gall to present this as tackling racial inequality.

Next, look at the behaviour of Speaker Pelosi, whose four-year campaign to oust Trump from office (on the grounds, it would seem, that he abused the US constitution simply by virtue of having been elected president) has now reached its hysterical apogee with her attempt to impeach him for the second time.

Pelosi told her Democratic colleagues that, after the Capitol riot, she had spoken to Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.”

But this was an abuse of her own constitutional power, which is limited to leading the legislative branch unless both the president and vice-president are incapacitated or removed from office — in which case she is third in line for the presidency. As the Wall Street Journal commented:

Mrs. Pelosi’s call to Gen. Milley is itself a violation of the separation of powers by seeking to inject herself into an executive-branch military decision. She can offer advice all she wants, but this call at this time has the sound of an order. It might even be construed by some as its own little coup — conniving with the military to relieve of command the person who remains the elected president.

What if an adversary leaps on the news and decides this is the moment to stage some military action when the US is consumed with internal conflict? Does Gen. Milley now have to consult with the Speaker before he acts in America’s defence? How anyone thinks her intervention would restore good constitutional order to government or some modicum of sanity to politics is a mystery.

Trump may be the Democrats’ principal obsession, but their target range is far broader. They and their left-wing supporters have used the killing of police officer Brian Sicknick during the storming of the Capitol to vilify Trump supporters as the enemy within.

Pelosi described his death as a reminder of the need to “protect our country from all threats, foreign and domestic.”  But Sicknick was himself a vehement Trump supporter. The New York Post reports that

… he had written letters to his congressman opposing Trump’s impeachment. Like many Trump supporters who are now being censored, he ­believed that the system is fundamentally rigged in favour of a narrow elite. He had used fiery rhetoric, even called for regime change in America.

More than 70 million Americans voted for Trump at November’s election. Yet it would appear that the Democrats and their henchmen now intend to “cancel” anyone who either voted for or supported Trump, simply for holding views they oppose.

Democrat Congressman Bennie Thompson, who chairs the Committee on Homeland Security, has said astonishingly that Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who led the  attempt to stop the certification of the election result and called for a congressional inquiry into the claims that it was fraudulent, should therefore be treated as terrorists and placed on a “No-fly” list.

And Democrat Senators Sherrod Brown and Patty Walsh said that Hawley and Cruz should resign or be expelled from the Senate.

Meanwhile the editor of Forbes, Randall Lane, has urged companies to blacklist anyone who worked for the Trump administration. Business Insider reports:

Businesses that choose to hire Trump spokespeople will, the editor said, be held to close scrutiny. “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie,” the magazine’s editor, Randall Lane, wrote. “We’re going to scrutinizse, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet.”

In the article titled “A Truth Reckoning: Why We’re Holding Those Who Lied For Trump Accountable,” Lane reflected on the lies that spurred rioters to ransack the US Capitol. The easiest way for American democracy to recover from the insurrection, he wrote, is to “create repercussions for those who don’t follow the civic norms.”

In the Forbes article, Lane called out by name Trump’s press secretaries Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany as well as Trump’s former White House counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, a group to which he referred as “ Trump’s fellow fabulists.”

It’s clear that the reason the left so badly need to make Trump disappear is not just his behaviour over the Capitol riot but what he represents. The people who now have a target on their backs are all those who either supported or voted for him — and beyond them, all who have views which threaten to get in the way of the Democrats’ agenda, gleefully trumpeted by the current Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer:

Now we take Georgia, then we change America!

It’s not enough just to take the White House. The Democrats and their supporters are intent upon stepping up their onslaught on core western principles; and the people now squarely in their target range are conservatives, anxious to conserve the west and its values.

The Democrats are not the party of healing and reconciliation. They are the party of division, resentment and vindictiveness. And the identity politics agenda they plan to implement, aided by the rest of the cultural oligarchy, will institutionalise those social pathologies and inflict them upon the American public.

Biden has said he will be a “President for all Americans”. What he actually means is that he will be a president for all the people who think like him. We can now see what’s coming for those who don’t.