I, Freddy Foreskin, do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King Charles the Third, King of Canada, his heirs and successors. So help me God.
What century do you live in? Why do you have a king? I, Freddy Foreskin, do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King Charles the Third, King of Canada, his heirs and successors. So help me God.
Democrats Hate The USA. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-ou...le-technocracy-07962a1d?mod=opinion_lead_pos5 How ‘Our Democracy’ Became Undemocratic The word used to signify elections and self-rule. Now it means whatever progressives want. There are a lot of loose, baggy terms in American political discourse: “populism,” “liberalism,” “evangelical.” These words, applied with care, still have their uses. I’m not convinced the same is true of “democracy.” Maybe it’s still a noble word in some sense, but its repeated abuse over many decades has made it useless. A democracy, when I was taught civics in the 1980s, was distinguishable from a republic. In a strict democracy, every citizen is asked to vote on every important public question. Should we raise taxes? Should we go to war with Carthage? Plebiscites on everything being impractical, the ancients invented republics, in which you vote for the people who make these decisions. Asked what the Founders had accomplished at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin didn’t say “a democracy—if you can keep it.” Most of the Founders equated democracy with mob rule and wanted to avoid it. For a few, notably Thomas Jefferson, the word connoted self-government and decentralization of power. Andrew Jackson and his followers used it that way. Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t often use the word, treated democracy as a positive term signifying equality and self-rule. With the rise of Progressivism at the turn of the 20th century, however, “democracy” took on meanings that had little to do with voting, elections, majorities and procedural freedoms. The activist and philosopher Jane Addams, in “Democracy and Social Ethics” (1902), defined democracy “not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.” In “Democracy and Education” (1916), the theorist John Dewey observed that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” These and many similar claims suggest that for early-20th-century Progressives “democracy” meant more or less whatever political aims Progressives thought good and desirable. Elsewhere in the world, the word “democratic” began attaching itself to distinctly undemocratic regimes and organizations. The Bolsheviks in Russia emerged from the Social Democratic Labor Party. Postwar Romania, in which dissent was outlawed, was run by the People’s Democratic Front. In the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, known in the West as North Vietnam, a favorable opinion of America or a desire to emigrate could get you and your family “re-educated” or murdered. In America, Students for a Democratic Society stood for an array of left-wing causes, but the right of people to vote against those causes didn’t compute. In the minds of SDS’s founders, its causes were democracy. Plainly “democratic” was doing the work of legitimation. A democratic party or front or republic meant something everyone could favor, even if it might disappear its opponents from time to time. The term “democratic socialism,” widely used in Europe and North America since the middle of the last century, was meant to signify the sort of socialism that people voted for. It wasn’t imposed on an unwilling people, as in Soviet Russia, but embraced willingly. The idealization of democracy took a break after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. Democracy, or “liberal democracy,” had won, and it was no longer necessary to defend it. That term “liberal democracy” denoted a loose collection of ideals including the rule of law, checks on government, personal autonomy, and a welfare state paid for by a robust market economy. You had the sense, though, in the ’90s and early 2000s, that the term’s most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy—a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes. Democracy as an ideal roared back with Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Suddenly it was being attacked. “Democracy dies in darkness” became the Washington Post’s official slogan (the Post meant this as a warning, though a skeptical observer might ask if it was an aspiration). Commentators worried that democracy was imperiled, menaced, on the verge of demise. Innumerable books and essays theorized about “threats” to and “assaults” on democracy. By now the term was a jumble. Commentators and politicos who worried that democracy was under threat seemed to hold the Deweyan view that democracy wasn’t so much a form of government as a means of expanding novel individual rights and generating other allegedly benign policy ends. At the same time they embraced an aggressive majoritarianism, demanding an end to the Electoral College and the filibuster and threatening to add states to the union and justices to the Supreme Court to achieve their goals. The word has only grown looser and baggier in recent years. In Israel, we were told in 2023, the Netanyahu government was assaulting democracy by attempting to curtail the Supreme Court’s power arbitrarily to strike down laws passed by democratic majorities. In the U.S., the 2024 election will be, according to President Biden, about “democracy.” In a speech commemorating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Valley Forge, Pa., Mr. Biden explained what he meant by the word. “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind,” he said, “to be who you are, to be who you want to be. Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy—democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes.”
CIA and foreign intelligence agencies illegally targeted 26 Trump associates before 2016 Russia collusion claims https://nypost.com/2024/02/13/news/...s-before-2016-russia-collusion-claims-report/ The US Intelligence Community asked foreign spy agencies to surveil 26 associates of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, which triggered the allegations that the former president’s campaign had been colluding with Russia, according to a report. Former CIA Director John Brennan identified and presented the targets to the US’s intelligence-sharing partners in the so-called “Five Eyes” agencies – the intelligence-gathering organizations in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – according to a report published Monday on Michael Shellenberger’s Public Substack. The report by independent journalists Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag has not been confirmed by The Post. They cite multiple unnamed sources, including ones close to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio).
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Hussein Obama Of course we found out that this meant weaponizing the IRS against his enemies, weaponizing the intelligence community against his political enemies, destroying the right to a secret ballot, attempting to create a national police that would report directly to him, and putting the conditions in place for the formation of ISIS. The War on the Secret Ballot The Obama administration has fired its opening salvo against a cornerstone of democracy: the right to secret ballot. The Obama administration has fired its opening salvo against a cornerstone of democracy: the right to secret ballot. Last fall, voters in four states voted overwhelmingly to amend their constitutions to protect the right of workers to vote by secret ballot in deciding whether or not to form unions. That right has been enshrined in federal law for 75 years but is threatened by bills pending in Congress. Nonetheless, the Obama National Labor Relations Board has filed a lawsuit against Arizona seeking to halt its protection of the right to secret ballot. Federal law governs labor relations, the NLRB asserts, and states cannot provide greater security for worker rights.