The Real Threat to American Democracy

Written by Tom Trinko

The real danger to American democracy doesn’t come from Russia.  The Russians had little impact on the last election, succeeding only in revealing that the DNC was breaking its own rules to suppress Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders.

Unfortunately, there are people who are working to undermine American democracy.  Here’s a short list of some of them:

1. Antifa: The Washington Post’s new slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness.”  But most of the left either overtly or tacitly approves of the use of violence by Antifa to silence voices it doesn’t like.  An electorate in darkness can’t vote intelligently.  Hence, if Americans don’t know the truth, they are at risk of voting against what’s best for them.  Antifa undermines our system by denying people the truth.

2. Activist Judges: A core belief on which America is based is that political power flows not from elite rulers, but from the people.  The people elect representatives, and if those representatives do things the people don’t like, the people elect someone new.  We see this in the case of Obamacare.  The Democrats pushed this first step toward socialized medicine through, and in the next election, the people voted the Democrats out.

When judges make up laws rather than interpret the law, including the Constitution, they subvert our democracy by arrogating to themselves the power that belongs to the people through their representatives.  For example, 55,000,000 Americans voted against redefining marriage, yet a few rich white lawyers on the Supreme Court imposed gay “marriage” on the country.

If the democratic process had been followed, the people could have thrown out of office the politicians who voted against the desires of the people, but because the redefinition of marriage was imposed by the courts, it’s nearly impossible to throw out the judges.  Impeaching a judge is much harder than electing a different senator, for example.

By stealing the people’s power, activist judges undermine democracy and reduce the importance of elections to what type of judges a candidate will support, since it is the judges who wield the real power in America today.  If judges only interpreted the law rather than making it, no one would care whom Trump nominated to the Supreme Court.

3. The Media: The purpose of a free press is to inform the people of the facts so that the people can decide how to vote.  As such, a free media will have different voices, because there are different ways to view the news.

Today, the major media are all in lockstep, acting as propagandists for the left.  If a news story is damaging for the left, the media will avoid covering it.  When a Democrat senator was on trial for corruption for weeks, the media barely covered the story, with two of the three networks not mentioning it once on their evening news shows.

Similarly, any voice that attacks Trump, no matter how lacking in credibility, will be repeated over and over.  Bill Clinton’s actions as a sexual predator were held by the major media to have no impact on his ability to be a good president.  But when Trump was shown to be a philanderer who engaged in inappropriate but consensual acts, the same media condemned him as a monster.  That the same people are saying contradictory things and hence aren’t credible doesn’t bother the media in the least.

By trying to distort the people’s view of reality through biased reporting, the media are enshrouding us in the very darkness that the Washington Post supposedly objects to and therefore impede our ability to effectively exercise our power.

4. The FBI and DOJ:  It’s clear that at the top, these organizations went beyond their charter and launched a massive espionage campaign against Trump to benefit Democrats.  We know that unverified rumors produced by a foreigner based on Russian sources were used to focus the full power of the Intelligence Community (I.C.) on Trump’s campaign.  We know that Democratic political appointees in the government identified which Trump campaign personnel were doing what.

We know that special prosecutor Robert Mueller was appointed in violation of the law.  There was no identifiable crime – James Comey admitted under oath that the claims made in his illegal leaks were not true.  Trump did not in fact order him to stand down or to exonerate Michael Flynn.

We know that the FBI and DOJ swept under the rug Hillary’s gross negligence in handling classified information and that Bill Clinton arranged a secret meeting with Loretta Lynch while the investigation was ongoing.  The only reason we know that the meeting occurred was due to the efforts of one brave local investigative reporter.

To this day, the FBI and DOJ are waging a war on the president – nothing less than an attempt to nullify the people’s vote in 2016.  Clearly, the FBI’s and DOJ’s malicious attacks on the president indicate that they think power belongs to the ruling elites, not the people.

5. The Intelligence Community: The fact that key players in the I.C. are amazingly biased against Trump is a serious issue.  When James Clapper was chief of the I.C., he worked to get the unverified Steele dossier a gloss of credibility so that the media could publish it.

When former CIA chief John Brennan calls for the president to be impeached because Trump spoke to Putin, we have good reason to believe that much of what is coming out of the I.C. can’t be trusted.

We have the I.C. declaring that the Russians meddled in the election, but they appear reticent to discuss the fact that the meddling had no real impact on how the vote turned out.  They furthermore declare that the Russians hacked the DNC emails even though they haven’t bothered to inspect the crime scene, the DNC server that was hacked.

By working hard to make it seem that the U.S. election was fraudulent, the I.C. is undermining the people’s trust in our elections and thereby weakening democracy.

6. Those Who Object to the Rule of Law: Whether it be refusing to enforce immigration law or refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, leftists are constantly demanding that instead of revising laws they don’t like through the democratic process, those laws should just be ignored.

Trump enforced our immigration laws, which resulted in children being temporarily separated from their criminal parents – something that happens to U.S. kids every day – resulting in the left demanding that Trump simply ignore the law.

When Trump asked the Democrats to work with him to craft new laws that would remove the problem, the Democrats refused.  The Democrats rejected the rule of law and the power of the people and demanded that Trump behave in a fascist and dictatorial way.

Rejecting the constitutional process for creating laws is a rejection of democracy, and it serves to undermine the power of voters.

Other groups are working hard to destroy democracy in America.  They too aren’t insidious foreign powers, but rather Americans who embrace fascism and totalitarianism.

The left and the media, which are pretty much one group, are working to undermine the American system because they believe in elections only when their candidate wins and because they believe that the elites have not only the right, but the moral obligation to rule over the rest of us.

Tell your friends there is a real threat to our freedom, but it’s not from Russia.  Rather, the real threat is the left in America, which has embraced fascism.

This article was originally published at AmericanThinker.com

You can read more of Tom’s rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.