Part 2
Democracy
We don’t live in a perfect democracy. In the USA we have what’s called a representative republic. Under our constitution we elect representatives to meet and debate and set and adjust public policy. What we have at the federal level, senators and representatives with the Senate and the House of Representatives, is basically duplicated at the state level for state governments, as well. For the presidential election the highest popular vote doesn’t always result in determining the winner. What happens is that each state has a number of special people called electors, and they take the vote tally of their state to cast their vote for president. We could call our government system a democracy, however that is rather a figurative term here.
We have three branches of federal government: Legislative (Congress, comprised of the Senate and the House of Representatives), Judicial (federal police, plus the courts with the Supreme Court at the top), and Executive (the Presidency, along with various departments comprising the Cabinet). They have checks and balances against power. Being a free society, we have the press, which historically has been referred to as the Fourth Estate, as the media acts as a fourth check and balance against the government. These amount to checks against corruption. Citizens can ascertain corruption and elect differently.
We have primarily two political parties. The Republican party is on “the right” – the conservative spectrum, clinging to traditional morality and values. The Democrat party is on “the left” – the progressive, and socially liberal spectrum. So what happens when many media publications and TV networks are, instead of apolitical and impartial, openly Democrat? In the past TV news was thought to be largely impartial. Now, without intentionally seeking conservative media, you get news practically custom-tailored by the Democratic National Committee. The mainstream media is your sound bite driven media of the big three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), or cable news that isn’t intentionally conservative. CNN and MSNBC can be fed stories, narratives, and political operatives to offer bias and opinion by the DNC. Conservative networks like Fox News, NewsMax, or OAN provide a voice of dissent from what 90% of the other TV news will be running with. Without conservative media, we would have a one party state, fully Democrat.
This has led to distorted perspectives of reality among much of the US population who is what you might call a low-information voter. This type may catch 30 minutes of national TV news on weeknights or on occasion. They may have a distaste for politics, or don’t see the need to broaden their news palate.
Without an eye or an ear to conservative media, you would miss out on particular truths that come to light. After the 2020 federal election where former Vice President Joe Biden won both the popular vote and the electoral vote over him, President Trump was dissatisfied. His campaign had received reports of stories of election fraud, and no court would allow any investigation to proceed. On January 6, 2021 Trump supporters held a large rally in Washington D.C. of some tens of thousands of people. Within were some bad actors, as well as an estimated hundreds of Federal agents blended in with the crowd. The chief of the Capitol Police (now former) has since stated that something fishy was going on with security on that day, that he could tell was deficient, and he testifies that he was strangely kept out of the loop. Toward the end of a speech President Trump advised supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. Later over at the Capitol Building, some bad actors began to violently force the guards surrounding the Capitol to abandon their perimeter, enabling people to push into the building. Many in the crowd, in herd mentality, followed them in. Many guards gave up and held the doors open for masses of people.
The scenes caught on camera were appalling — to see an institution of the United States being flooded into by a mob, who suddenly was not violent, but more curious and mischievous. TV news called the breach of the Capitol an “insurrection”, which being an attempt to overthrow the government, isn’t accurate. To blame President Trump for an insurrection, or to blame him for the bad actors, is also inaccurate. The word insurrection was repeatedly plastered in headlines and spoken of with the accusation that President Trump was the instigator. Reports in the media were crafted with Democrat bias so as to suggest that President Trump sought to unlawfully retain power and override the election votes.
What followed was a deceptively biased televised January 6th Commission investigation, which withheld exculpatory evidence and edited video to score political points through deceit. That led to an attempted impeachment of then former President Trump which was unsuccessful. During this impeachment, President Trump’s lawyers presented evidence that the mainstream media lied about him in the aftermath of a horrible protester and counter-protester fight in Charlottesville, North Carolina. Fundamentally that was a public dispute about removing confederate statues which led to a maniac driving into a crowd and killing an innocent woman. If you start this video at about the 13 minute 13 second mark and watch about 3½ minutes in, you will see that deceptive editing on all major networks (except conservative leaning) was used to unapologetically defame President Trump.
Sidebar: Here is a slightly longer starting point at the 10 minute 32 mark that covers deceptive editing on the part of the J6 Committee.
He was presented in the sound bite driven TV newscasts as having made a moral equivocation between the two protesting parties. The famous sound bite quotes him as saying “there were very fine people on both sides.” Considering there was a nutty white supremacist group in the crowd, that makes the President look pretty bad as making a moral equivocation like that. It makes him sound sympathetic to such a group. So seeing only the edited clip, millions of future 2020 election voters saw that, and just like the DNC wanted, they were fed a lie and they saw him as an unsupportable racist. Whether you were paying attention at the time, or can remember that far back or not, with the YouTube video above, you can see the truth for yourself. During his news conference with a challenging press he stated “Excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did.” What he then said was:
“I’m not talking about the neo-nazis and the white nationalists because they should be condemned, totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now in the other group also you had some fine people, but you also had trouble makers. And you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you gotta. You had a lot of bad – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.”
The sin of omission gave liberal journalists the opening to ask 2020 presidential candidate Trump if he would renounce white supremacism, as if he had never weighed in on the topic after Charlottesville, because the American public was only given a particular sound bite. In asking President Trump to denounce white supremacy, that tied the stink of the phrase to him and perpetuated an image of the president as if he were racist, and as if that were a necessary question. Multiple so-called journalists tried this tactic. In the light of the truth, this was slimy. However at the time it furthered the goal of the DNC that they would return to political power, by influencing voters.
President Biden even in the 2020 election cycle claimed that opposing a racist president (based on the Charlottesville media lie) was what spurred him to run for the presidency, with his high platitude of “fighting for the soul of America”.
In the same election season evidence of Biden’s own past of corruption of enriching him and his family by influence peddling with foreign governments and foreign companies, was suppressed as “Russian disinformation”. It was suppressed at large scale by Twitter and Facebook to prevent discussion of relevant news under orders from those inside the government, at the time captained by Trump, and unbeknownst to him. This is an example of what came to be called the deep state. The gist is that Democrats in various government positions wanted to inhibit the Trump and Republican agenda illegally, and to use government powers to have a Democrat elected to the presidency. The net effect was to swing power back to the Democrats. Some voters were able to learn about the corruption of the Biden family, but only through conservative media such as talk radio, Fox News, and other freer online outlets.
Much controversy was made by President Trump believing that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Allegations were made that his campaign sought to steal it back with a slate of false electors. Historically, if there was a dispute then alternate electors may have needed to have been used, and so they would have followed historical precedent, had that been needed. Allegations were made that he wanted to bully the state of Georgia in the lead up to the transition of power on January 20 for 11,000 votes that would win him the state. Various institutions where Democrats are in power have sought to interfere with the 2024 Trump campaign, based on assertions and mischaracterizations wherever possible.
Some say that people who watch CNN or MSNBC don’t know anything. Some say that people who watch Fox News don’t know anything. What I tell people is that you get news and you get opinion. You have to separate the two in your mind. You have to discern when hearing, like you would when reading something. In conservative media, they wouldn’t state something without being able to back it up. Instead with liberal news and pundits you may get something stated in a very emotionally laden manner as if it were fact, when it’s not. Likewise I’ve observed that news writers in the mainstream media may exhibit a short memory regarding things they’ve reported in the past. Conservative commentators have the longest memory.
So democracy is threatened when checks against corruption fail, many of which I’ve referenced here. Conservative commentators have called an irrational dislike of or hatred of President Trump, “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. It’s an effect of being misled or “programmed” to that behavior of dislike or hatred. Many voters don’t see how they have been used. The tribal, partisan mentality can be a result of manipulation that can be hard to break free from.
Trump’s political opponents hurled the word “chaos” at him on the campaign trail without getting into specifics. Chaos effectively boils down to an exaggeration and gross oversimplification to him firing various staffers at various points in his four year term. It’s clear that as a manager he wanted team members that pursued what he wanted, and were onboard with his vision. Compare that with a pro baseball manager changing out players during the course of a season. Chaos?
Former President Trump isn’t so much a divisive figure, as much as his political opposition has made him out to be. The DNC has, in their strategy of media domination, invented a caricature persona that looks like him that they can vilify and use to divide. What is remarkable is that when he is attacked rhetorically, he doesn’t take it, and often he retaliates. He doesn’t cave to the political weaponry that would normally work, and that drives the liberal pundits to desperation.
My takeaway is that conservatism is right. Its heart is in the right place. Vote “right”. If you don’t already patronize conservative media, especially talk radio personalities, expand where you source your news from. Fox News, for example, consistently has higher ratings than CNN and MSNBC combined. As a new Christian you may see many things differently when you embrace that which is intellectually honest.
Next: Secular Attitudes