by Conrad Black
The long-awaited opening of the Democrats’ final desperate extravaganza of Trump-hate finally came on Thursday, June 9.
The battle lines are clear: One side claims to believe that the 2020 presidential election was clean and unquestionable and that the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an attempted insurrection launched by former President Donald Trump to undo a fair election result and that it constituted a potentially mortal assault upon American democracy.
The other side believes that with 4.8 million harvested ballots, the absence of Republican observers at strategic moments of vote-counting in several swing states, the highly partisan influence of the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy and rabidly partisan Democrats such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and the failure of the judiciary to address any of the constitutional challenges to the 2020 presidential election, it is at best unclear who the real winner of the election was.
This side regrets the indignities at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but considers that Trump specifically urged the large crowd that he addressed on the morning of that day to act peacefully, that he and his political organization had absolutely nothing to do with and certainly did not stand to gain from the invasion of the Capitol, and that the attempt to impute the inspiration for this hooliganism to Trump is just the last of the many outrages and grievous illegalities committed by Trump’s enemies during the election campaign, on election night, and subsequently.
Everybody accepts that Joe Biden was legally inaugurated and is the president, but if fewer than 50,000 votes, out of millions that may not have been legally cast, flipped from Biden to Trump in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won in the Electoral College.
On the charges concerning Jan. 6 itself, the televised hearings on Thursday night confirmed the vacuous artificiality of the anti-Trump case. It’s acknowledged that no link has been established between the Trump organization and the rioters. It’s now clear that the most destructive of the vandals who entered the Capitol didn’t even attend the preceding Trump speech and used it as a pretext and went directly to the Capitol to form the vanguard of the advancing demonstrators.
Hundreds of arrested people were held in solitary detention for many months and were undoubtedly subjected to the customary techniques of American prosecutors: threatening draconian sentences but promising extreme leniency and a guarantee against any possible suit for perjury if the targeted suspects can produce inculpatory recollections of use to the prosecutors; even this notoriously abusive and widespread failing of the American criminal justice system didn’t produce anyone who alleged any significant improprieties against Trump or his campaign. It’s conceded that Trump urged the mayor of Washington and the speaker of the House to reinforce the Capitol and that he offered to mobilize 20,000 national guardsmen to do so, but that they would not hear of it.
The endless unfounded allegations directed at Trump are increasingly incongruous and ineffective. He has been out of office, constitutionally legally or not, for 17 months. Evidence piles up every month of a monstrous attempt by the Democratic National Committee in collusion with the FBI and senior intelligence officials to cheat him out of his 2016 election victory. And the regime that did take office settles each week more firmly into a quagmire of incompetence, unpopularity, and worldwide disrespect with no precedent in the history of the American presidency since before the Civil War.
The committee itself has no legitimacy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) churlishly rejected Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) suggested delegation, and the Republicans she appointed are the two most outspoken Republican Trump-haters in elective office, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, and neither of them is likely to be in elective office after next January.
The Democrats on the committee constitute a vanguard of the anti-Trump congressional assassination squad: Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), and Benny Thompson of Mississippi, whose irrational partisanship is such that in 2005 he voted, for no audible reason, not to confirm the George W. Bush Ohio electors to the Electoral College even though that election was not in the slightest disputed. Trump-hating committee member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who led the second impeachment of him, similarly objected to Trump’s Florida electors in 2016.
Whatever Donald Trump’s political future may be, the Democratic crusade to demonize him has failed. Despite massive attempts to publicize the television debut of the Jan. 6 events, the three principal networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, which normally pull 18 million viewers between them in that time zone, were down about 35 percent with NBC and CBS down over 40 percent. CNN and MSNBC, the anti-Trump cable networks, were also down substantially, even though they’d already lost over half their viewers at the end of the Trump administration early last year.
The failure of the whole project was further illustrated by the rapturous words of approval of the most vociferous and consistent television news Trump-haters: One knew it had been a failure when Chris Wallace, who made the first of the 2020 presidential debates a two-to-one affair, in one of his few cameo appearances since the Titanic-like demise of the CNN streaming service, labeled Thursday night’s droning soporiferous farrago of anti-Trump nonsense a “very powerful” narrative.
It’s true that American democracy is under some threat, but the revelations of Hillary Clinton allegedly masterminding and Barack Obama approving the Trump-Russian collusion fraud, and the frenzied Democratic allegations that a sensible verification of ballots, which the great majority of the country favors, constitutes a return of Jim Crow, the Klan, and slavery itself, demonstrate that the Democrats and not the Republicans are the source of it.
On the adduced evidence, it’s a good deal more likely that the Democrats saw much of what was coming and ignored the request of Trump and others to provide additional security around the Capitol in the prayerful hope for just what did occur and that it would enable them to destroy the Trump phenomenon once and for all.
The voters seem not to be distracted, and they will not be distracted by a spurious revival of the abortion issue. With just four and a half months to go before the midterm elections and skyrocketing inflation, gasoline prices, illegal immigration, violent crime, and foreign policy fiascos on all continents except Antarctica, the only imaginable method by which the Biden administration could palliate the chastisement it has justly earned from the voters is if it can play a decisive role in producing a satisfactory negotiated end to the Ukraine war. This would make some concessions to the Russians in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, but anchor Ukraine solidly in the West with an ironclad NATO and Russian guarantee of Ukraine’s frontiers.
The only Americans visible to me in this administration who might have the stature and the ability to perform such a service are national security adviser Jake Sullivan, CIA director William Burns, and, conceivably, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. They’re not world beaters, but “In the valley of the blind,” etc. Trump-hate won’t fly anymore and “1/6” was a farce. Its most revealing moment was when the senators were hiding under their desks with their ludicrous anti-concussion hats on, a pose becoming to most of them.
First published in the Epoch Times.
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5 Responses
Donald (The Demagogue) Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he called his followers to DC, after spending weeks relentlessly making false (and often stupid) accusations that a perfectly legitimate election had somehow been “stolen”, accusations which took advantage of the fact that it was a close contest which took place in the midst of an extraordinary public health incident.
Supposedly, these supporters he called to DC were coming to listen to a speech. By some coincidence, this speech was timed not just for the day but the very hour that Congress was meeting to certify the result. Conrad claims that Donald Trump “urged his supporters to act peacefully”, but that’s not true. It’s as clear as day from the things he said that his purpose was to incite that crowd. What it did is exactly what he intended for it to do.
The United States is a democracy with an independent judiciary. Several dozen lawsuits were filed by Trump’s followers, and all were dismissed or ruled against. If a person’s conclusion from this is not that the lawsuits, filed in different courts across the country, were without merit but that somehow, all of those courts refused to allow those cases to proceed, then that person is either naive or a deliberate liar.
There are too many other shameless falsehoods and deceptions here for a person with better things to do to spend time rebutting. Suffice it to say that this is nothing more than a propaganda piece written to drum up support for Conrad’s master The Demagogue and his deranged personality cult.
@DDOK
Please be kind enough to give one or more quotes from D. Trump requesting his supporters to behave violently. Intention to permit/promote violence was more obviously the intent of Pelosi, Schumer, DC’s mayor all of whom refused adequate protection of the Capitol, as had been requested by Trump well before Jan 6.
Your diatribe is ludicrous without specific counter-evidence to support your case.
How is it that Senator Cruz could not get a DOJ/FBI numerical reply when he asked how many of their agents were infiltrated to the Jan 6 crowd? What was their purpose there if not to activate the crowd? Why have so many of the arrestees been held in prison with no public hearings/trials? When and where were the disputed States’ fraud evidence examined publicly by State courts or by the SCOTUS? Why were States’ voting, carried out under illegal procedures, certified as valid?
As Porky Pig might say, “Something smells rotten in DC”.
“Please be kind enough to give one or more quotes from D. Trump requesting his supporters to behave violently.”
Sorry, but I can’t be bothered to do that for you. You can read and watch the speech for yourself.
“Intention to permit/promote violence was more obviously the intent of Pelosi, Schumer, DC’s mayor all of whom refused adequate protection of the Capitol”
“What was their purpose there if not to activate the crowd?”
If you think what happened is
That’s nonsense pushed by the right in an attempt to shift the blame off of The Demagogue and onto the Democrats.
“How is it that Senator Cruz could not get a DOJ/FBI numerical reply when he asked how many of their agents were infiltrated to the Jan 6 crowd?”
A reasonable person could think of several reasonable answers to that question.
“What was their purpose there if not to activate the crowd?”
So in your opinion the massive crowd that traveled to DC dressed in helmets and other combat gear was entirely peaceful, but for some provocateurs from the government sprinkled amongst them, it would have stayed peaceful. The Capitol storming was basically the doing of the FBI. That is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard in my life.
“When and where were the disputed States’ fraud evidence examined publicly by State courts or by the SCOTUS?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election#Case_summaries
I really don’t have the time to respond to the rest of your questions. You can do your own research.
Thank you for your reply on the voting legitimacy issue. The reference you presented notes the various challenging States having their ‘complaint’ cases rejected because those states did not have Constitutional ‘standing’ to have their challenges considered according to the SCOTUS majority opinion. That’s my disappointment— that the SCOTUS considered formal status more important than examining the multiState request challenging validity of crucial votes affecting the result of the 50-State President election.
It’s 2022 now; let’s see what important information the Jan 6 Commission discovers, what it prefers to conceal, what committee members, witnesses and questions are permitted.
Thank you again for expressing your beliefs.
Ignorance is bliss. And DDOK has clearly swallowed the Jan 6 “armed insurrection planned meticulously by the sinister Trump to overthrow the government of the US” narrative hook line & sinker. The point of Mr Black’s article above is that most of the public regard the Jan 6 hearings as a distraction to the very real pain they are feeling as a result of the utter incompetence of the Biden administration. And the chief underlying reason for the public’s disdain is a deep scepticism (to put it mildly) about the corporate mass media which is investing so much time in the current Jan hearings but has underplayed, or simply ignored real issues like crime, rampant inflation, record fuel prices and un-policed immigration, not to mention the full truth about Jan 6.
The bigger point is that, like an independent judiciary, a free media which serves as a watchdog for all is an essential pillar of democracy if it is to function properly. But the corporate mainstream media in the US has disgraced itself so thoroughly over the past 6 years that ever fewer people even bother to consume it, and if they do, treat it with a high degree of sceptism. And who can blame them? We have seen outright lies published on key news items, for example: Bountygate, Rittenhouse, Smollet, Lafayette park, the Whitmer “kidnap plot”, the Biden laptop; and of course the Russiagate conspiracy, which dwarfs Watergate in its scope. Apologies & corrections are rare; full disclosure of the truth non-existent. Then there were the bald-faced lies, deceit, divisive coercion, hate-filled rhetoric, censorship and absurdities of the recent covid drama which were all zealously propagated by the same media.
And of course there has been much manipulation, amplification and memory-holing of Jan 6, not least about the presence of the mysterious Ray Epps & his team, inconveniently discovered by non-corporate media outlets and about whom even lower FBI management was unaware (hence his 6 month sojourn on the ‘most wanted’ list before being surreptitiously removed). Damning video evidence of Epps shows him repeatedly provoking people to “go into the capitol”. Not a single corporate media outlet investigated this further; likewise there was zero effort by mainstream media to investigate – or indeed merely justify – the usage of the $400 + million parachuted into key swing states by media mogul Zuckerberg to “promote safe and reliable voting”. The media lied, too, about the ONE govt death on Jan 6 (security guard Sicknick) whom they claimed was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. All they has to do was speak to his family to discover the truth.
Remember too, that long before Jan 6, the same media pushed claims that the 2016 election was stolen & encouraged the destructive BLM riots in 2020. After Jan 6 they loudly cheered on the brazen mass internet censorship by social media corporations, including an entire social media app literally unplugged overnight. It has been a non-stop litany of untruths, omissions, censorship and frequently outright propaganda. The DNC actually hired a firm (Fusion GPS) to manufacture disinformation to support the preposterous assertion that Trump was a “Russian asset” and the corporate media went along with this fiction for 3 years, giving a new meaning to the term media hysteria. Shameless falsehoods and deceptions indeed! And practiced by an institution which is supposed to be a pillar of democracy but has now been irredeemably corrupted.
If DDOK is on the lookout for demagogy, insurrection and threats to democracy I would suggest he look beyond the costumed buffoons & selfie-taking grandmothers of Jan 6. This is what the soon-to-be vice-president of the US, Kamala Harris told talk show host Stephen Colbert in June 2020 at the height of the BLM riots:
“They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. They’re not. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels – that they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”
More recently, we have seen Democrat zealots, egged on by incendiary rhetoric from people like by Maxine Waters and Chuck Schumer, blockade the private homes of the judges of the Supreme court of the United States of America, something which has never happened in the entire history of US democracy. One zealot, suitably inspired, determined to assassinate one of the judges. Insurrection? On the evening of Friday 24th June, the Arizona State Senate was blockaded by pro-abortion zealots who tried to break windows and doors. State senators were trapped inside and tear gas was used by security. The mob then resorted to spraying monuments outside the Senate with paint and making fires.