President Joe Biden's recent remarks on "protecting the sacred, constitutional right to vote" advocated for nothing of the sort. Biden, at his demagogic worst, in fact maligned those who would ensure the sanctity of the vote by passing laws undoing the election security-threatening, confidence-sapping, legitimacy-imperiling practices enacted during the COVID-stricken 2020 election season.
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© Drew Angerer/Getty Images U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about voting rights at the National Constitution Center on July 13, 2021 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Biden's disturbing rhetoric might be chalked up to politics, but when considered in the broader context of the Biden administration's unprecedented and recently revealed "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism" document, which links questions about election integrity to terrorism, it takes on an even more sinister edge.Biden describes the election reforms now being considered in some Republican-controlled state legislatures, most of which aim to restore some semblance of normalcy with respect to absentee and mail-in voting, as a "21st-century Jim Crow assault" and "the most dangerous threat to voting and integrity of free and fair elections in our history."
"To me, this is simple," says Biden, "This is election subversion...an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty." The president goes still further: "We're are [sic] facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That's not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th."
Some question President Biden's acuity, but if nothing else, the mental gymnastics and imagination of his handlers here is impressive. By the Biden standard, every election predating November 3, 2020 necessarily constituted an attack on the republic.
The fact of the matter is that voting in-person, on a single election day and with photo identification, is the most legitimate way to pick our leaders. The further away we move from this system, the greater the opportunity for fraud and corruption, the greater our inability to detect it and the less confidence Americans will have in the system at large. It is this deeply destabilizing issue that many state legislatures are now acting upon—and at times, as in the Georgia law that Biden disingenuously calls "vicious," in relatively weak fashion.
Biden's remarks came amidst his Justice Department's embarrassing effort to sue Georgia over that very law—one softer in some respects than that of his native Delaware—just as allegations mount in the Peach State of material illegal voting and other fraud in the 2020 election.
Biden's Justice Department is similarly challenging Arizona's Maricopa County audit on—sticking with the Jim Crow theme—civil rights grounds.
If one truly believed the 2020 election was 100 percent above-board, of course, he would be more than happy to let his perceived political adversaries humiliate themselves with such sure-to-be-fruitless efforts. He would also not feel the need to resort to such extreme rhetorical exaggeration.
Biden, in his remarks, also pointed toward a redoubled effort to push the so-called "For the People Act" through the Senate. This bill would enshrine the extraordinary, putatively COVID-driven voting measures that made the 2020 race the first mass mail-in election in U.S. history, as well as federalize elections to an unprecedented degree.
Some commentators have speculated that Biden's bombast was aimed at generating the pressure necessary to get more sober Democratic senators on board with a filibuster "carveout" to ram this revolutionary legislation through. Still others have suggested that this is political theater squarely aimed at appeasing the party's more radical progressives.
But there's a broader context to Biden vilifying half the country as not just bigots and "subverters," but outright enemies of the state.
When Biden invokes Jim Crow and equates January 6 with the Civil War, one should not assume these are just throwaway lines, aimed at trolling the roughly half of the country that voted for President Trump.
The Biden administration's chilling "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism" says that "racism and bigotry...perpetuate the domestic terror threat," that "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists...present the most lethal DVE [domestic violent extremism] threat" and that "narratives of fraud in the recent general election...will almost certainly spur some DVEs [domestic violent extremists] to try to engage in violence this year."
If one can draw a straight line from supporting voting integrity to racism and violent extremism/terrorism, and if the Biden administration is comparing voting integrity supporters to Confederates, shouldn't the American people be concerned?
It is also worth noting that FBI Director Christopher Wray has declared the Capitol Riot to be an act of domestic terrorism. Accordingly, the Department of Justice National Security Division's Counterterrorism Section is prosecuting some of the relevant cases stemming from January 6.
Meanwhile, as American Greatness' Julie Kelly notes, "Nearly every charging document filed by Joe Biden's Justice Department in the Capitol breach probe mentions the defendant's belief about the 2020 presidential election as evidence of wrongdoing." Judges have concurred with prosecutors, in some instances, in denying defendants bail based on the idea that their views on the 2020 election make them a public danger.
One need not read closely between the lines to see what is really going on here: The Biden administration is redefining dissent to its agenda—the ruling class' agenda—as violent extremism that poses a threat to the homeland. The administration is pledging to pursue that threat with this first-of-its-kind, whole-of-society domestic terror policy.
President Biden's words, ironically delivered at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, therefore ought not to be dismissed as mere pablum or propaganda.
They ought to be taken very, very seriously. Judging by the apparent political persecution at hand in the treatment of some Capitol Rioters—seemingly the archetype of the Biden administration's broader domestic terror strategy—this is exactly the message his administration seeks to deliver.
Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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fiden declares war on all republicans, conservatives, and Caucasians - with the full weight of teh DOJ to open AOC re-education camps for over half the US population.
from Newsweek - hardly a Conservative publication.
fiden makes it clear they intend to control america totally under a marxist totalitarian regime.
