Heather Mac Donald seems to think of this as a good thing. Me, I’m not so sure about that.
Well, that was a dud. Not the abortive “red wave,” but the Democratic expectation (read: ill-disguised hope) that “election deniers” would disrupt polling places on Tuesday with violence and intimidation. In October, a national security bulletin had warned that poll workers were at physical risk from homegrown election terrorists. The Justice Department let it be known that it was monitoring threats against election employees. Illinois officials installed panic buttons and security locks in election offices. People using ballot drop-off boxes were said to be at risk of violent intimidation from crazed MAGA supporters. Michigan anticipated that right-wing poll watchers would disrupt ballot tabulation in Detroit. Election-deniers who had run for office and lost would allegedly refuse to concede defeat, putting “democracy,” in establishment parlance, at further risk. “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law,” warned historian Michael Beschloss, who wondered “whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
None of these predictions panned out. There was no electoral violence or intimidation. No one mobbed ballot boxes or election offices. As of this writing, political election-deniers who lost their races have accepted defeat.
We have been through this hysteria before. Predictions of right-wing violence are now a standard feature of Democratic rhetoric. In the lead-up to January 6, 2022 (the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot), the media, politicians, and the Biden national-security apparatus warned that “domestic violent extremists” were likely to strike again. Washington, D.C., was reportedly on edge in anticipation of the MAGA rebels. As it turned out, January 6, 2022, was notable only for the maudlin theatrics of newly patriotic Democrats, who softly sang “God Bless America” in a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps, as calm engulfed them.
During the previous year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security had issued regular warnings about election-denying terrorism. The summer of 2021, August 2021, September 2021—all provoked a satisfying increase in alerts and in precautionary barricades and bollards. And still, the right-wing terrorists did not strike.
This is where Mac Donald, quite disappointingly, lapses into some garden-variety Swamp-establishment boilerplate decrying the “loathsome, despicable mob violence of January 6, 2021.” We’ve all seen all too much of that garbage by now; I see no need to include any more of it here, no matter who says it or how much I may think of them otherwise. Onwards.
The “violent election-deniers” narrative is a subset of the larger white supremacist conceit so beloved of President Joe Biden. Biden has regularly speechified about the enduring strain of white supremacy in the American character and about its salience for contemporary street violence. In September 2022, for example, the president convened a White House summit against racism and right-wing hate. His portrayal of U.S. history consisted of one dispiriting atrocity after another.
No matter. The fiction of a white-supremacist, election-denying terror threat has allowed an expansion of government power and a wide-ranging assault on merit and speech. Biden boasts that on his first day in office, he directed national security officials to develop a strategy for countering domestic terrorism, focused exclusively on white supremacists. His since-discontinued Disinformation Governance Board would have surveilled and censored social media users who challenged the validity of elections—something that remains the prerogative of every American, even if those challenges are baseless. The right to free expression is not contingent on the truth of one’s speech. Private companies, whether in media, finance, or tech, routinely censor speakers they deem bigoted. The idea that white Americans can’t stop discriminating against people of color, even to the point of violence, has unleashed an avalanche of merit-destroying race and sex preferences throughout science, medicine, law, business, government, and education. Voting procedures are being recklessly loosened on the false theory that voter-identification requirements represent a ploy to disenfranchise minority voters. The focus on fictional white-supremacist, election-doubting violence allows Democrats to deny the real source of street violence in the U.S.: inner-city criminals, further emboldened by post-George Floyd depolicing, decriminalization, and decarceration.
Yet somehow, you choose to take Biden & Pals’ equally-specious J6 narrative as Gospel truth…WHY, exactly?
The lack of electoral violence this week will have no effect on the dominant Democratic narrative.
No, it most certainly will not. Anyone who objects to the dominant DemonRat narrative, however mildly, peaceably, or respectfully, will continue to be smeared, vilified, and bunged into the Gulag-Garland Archipelago indefinitely, just as they have been right along. Which tells me that it may be time, and past time, to re-instill an appropriate and becoming fear into these ersatz “public servants,” however that needs to be accomplished.
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I wish to hell that our side really was what our enemies accuse us of being. If we were, they wouldn’t be able to get away with squat.
I wish we had an ‘our side’ in DC. The Democratic Party is our enemy. And the Republican Party is our…?
Enemy.
Of the two, the R’s are the worst, just like all traitors are the worst.