A prominently large yard sign in front of a very expensive home in my neighborhood proclaiming "Democracy Dies in Darkness" piqued my curiosity regarding the owner’s definition of the victim word — the oppressor apparently being "tyranny" — and their political alignment.
And I can readily guess which party.
A memory immediately flashes to mind of former President Joe Biden’s 2022 midterm election season speech ominously staged before an eerily red-illuminated Philadelphia Independence Hall with two Marine honor guards in the background where he intoned,
"As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault."
Later, during a 2024 reelection bid speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capital riots, Biden again charged that democracy and fundamental freedoms were under threat if former President Donald J. Trump returned to the White House.
"The choice is clear," Biden said: "Donald Trump's campaign is about him. Not America, not you. Donald Trump's campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future.
"He's willing to sacrifice our democracy, [to] put himself in power."
Writing recently in The Wall Street Journal, regular columnist Walter Russell Mead, certainly no Donald Trump fan, argues that the traditionally liberal meaning of democracy, globally, is "in retreat."
Mead points out that too many attendees at the annual Copenhagen Democracy Summit, for example, and especially those in Europe, "conflate democracy as process — free elections with a free press to determine who gets to run a particular country — with electoral outcomes."
Accordingly, he observes, "They define a democratic election as one in which the right people [in their view] win . . . even if the winner is a bad person with bad ideas."
Under another unsatisfactory definition, Mead interprets that "it becomes the duty of democracy advocates to suppress their domestic opponents," whereby police should investigate citizens who post "antidemocratic" tweets on Twitter/X and governments can and should ban antidemocratic candidates or outlaw antidemocratic political parties for the crime of advocating "undemocratic" ideas whether or not these ideas are popular.
Here, "the more popular an 'antidemocratic' idea becomes, the more necessary it is to suppress its supporters."
Such an approach, Mead warns, is madness.
"Democracy isn’t about enshrining the cultural and political preferences of the "educated professional classes on the rest of society," but is rather about self-government — not necessarily good government — "a tool by which the majority can check the pretensions and delusions of a self-regarding elite."
Mead concludes that all-to-frequent arguments that ignorant and willful popular masses have failed the cause of democracy are cop-outs, whereby it is the elites and establishments of the democratic world who are failing in producing strong leaders.
Or perhaps, they are intentionally producing weak faux leaders they can control?
Warranting special irony, adjacent to Mead’s article The Wall Street Journal ran a review by Tunku Varadarajan of a new book, "Original Sin" authored by CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson regarding the widespread legacy media elite coverup of President Biden’s cognitive decline.
This is discussed in my previous column.
Varadarajan writes that "elites of the Democratic Party and the media had their eyes and minds closed and couldn’t — or wouldn’t — see what the rest of us saw: a doddering, senescent president who was frequently incoherent and rambling when he spoke; who lost his recall for names and faces (failing to recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser, referring to President Macron of France as Mitterrand); and was seemingly drained of energy at all times."
Following U.S. Special Counsel Robert Hur's released report which detailed Joe Biden’s memory struggles that would have disqualified him to stand trial for illegal possession of classified documents, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and other Democratic Party leaders assured us he was fully up to the challenge of leading the nation and the free world.
Recent public audio releases of Hur’s interview posted in full by the news site Axios reveal that if anything, Biden’s cognitive confusion was even worse than the report described!
That cognitive coverup myth publicly imploded during Biden’s ill-fated presidential debate with Trump.
A new bombshell report draws suspicions that Joe’s handlers have also concealed the former president’s dangerously poor physical health throughout his time in office.
If so, and taken collectively, when does "undemocratic" behavior morph into deceptive sabotage of democratic principles, tyranny, possibly treasonous actions?
Maybe it begins when a political party and compliant media uses COVID-19 as an excuse to isolate and protect a preferred candidate from public view, and or interactions, knowing he is mentally challenged to a highly appreciable degree?
Perhaps when partisan heads of the FBI perpetuate an elaborate Russia collusion hoax against that party’s opposition candidate, use it to spy on that candidate’s campaign and associates, repeatedly tamper with FISA court investigation authorizations against those associates, and then discredit and withhold laptop evidence in their possession revealing purportedly nefarious activities by the preferred candidate’s son until after a presidential election?
Might department-level treachery turn to broad-scale tyranny through weaponization of the justice system to conduct baseless impeachments to remove a sitting president from office and attempts to disqualify him from reelection through endless lawfare attempts to criminalize, bankrupt, and incarcerate him?
Does tyranny become treasonous when unelected presidential handlers make cynical mockery of voter trust through exploitation of cognitive impairments using autopen signature mimicry to circumvent top-level authority concerning decisions of utmost domestic and global importance?
Yes, democracy does indeed die in darkness.
It’s time to turn on the lights and reveal the true villains.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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