As important as all the issues are, such as illegal immigration streaming through the deliberately open southern border, the erosion of everyday American wages from inflation, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the lies foisted on America for years about Joe Biden’s mental state and so on, but what is arguably the most important issue facing voters in 2024 is being relatively neglected; for it to get somewhat lost in the shuffle does a great disservice, because it, unless soundly rejected at the polls, will destroy our democracy, turning the Land of the Free into a banana republic. It is time to elevate that issue to the top of the deck.
That issue is the unprecedented weaponization of our government to attack the administration’s political opponents, i.e., to steal the election before the voting even starts. The weaponization began with the Obama-Biden regime, when the IRS attacked between 200 and 400 conservative groups in order to assist with the 2012 re-election campaign. Obama brazenly announced that there was not “a smidgen of corruption” in that outrage! When the compliant mainstream media went along, the current Biden-Harris regime was encouraged to elevate the weaponization to much greater heights.
The strategy is so pervasive that both in its separate elements, and taken together, there is no precedent even remotely close in American history. The Democrats, using the combined power of the vast federal government apparatus and its accomplices, have, inter alia, tried or succeeded in doing the following:
- removing the Republican candidate from the ballot,
- gagging him,
- tying him up in court,
- confiscating his money,
- raiding his house,
- deliberately affording him less Secret Service protection than requested and needed,
- committing the statistical fraud of 91 indictments,
- denying due process (as in the Pelosi-selected committee),
- coercing and/or “suggesting” media and social media censorship,
- selective solitary confinement of political protesters if Republican, but not if Democrat,
- perpetuating the lie of the Russian collusion hoax.
Once upon a time, classic liberals denounced anything remotely approaching this panoply of corrupt abuse. For example, as recently as 1996, liberal author Herbert Mitgang wrote disapprovingly of this practice by the Authors League Council in 1952, found in his work Dangerous Dossiers:
[T]oday’s growing practice of blacklisting writers...now emphatically reaffirms [the] position that such ‘political screening’ constitutes a basic threat to the entire body of free American writing.
From the earliest days of this nation’s life, our tradition has been that writers and writing should be free of political control. Today this tradition is being eroded by fear. Today any American writer may be subject to dismissal, disgrace and disaster through the organized activities of self-appointed monitors eager to defend the nation on their own terms.
Numerous other classical liberals have made similar points, from John Milton, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill to Alexander Meiklejohn, and the abuses they denounced were in the aggregate and singly far less than what the Biden-Harris regime has imposed upon our nation.
It is time to make this outrageous weaponization a major issue. It is why I continue to ask others, especially my liberal friends, to frame this election as being a simple choice: Is your distaste for one individual more important to you than our democracy?
Image by Andrea Widburg.