Tag: 2024 elections

Secretary Of State That Kicked Trump From Maine Ballot Wants ‘Better Leaders’ In Power To Prevent ‘Election Sabotage’

The precedent being set by states like Colorado and Maine could change the political landscape of America forever if allowed to go unchallenged.  Removing presidential candidates from the ballot based on unilateral opinion rather than any kind of legally arbitrated decision or criminal conviction is the most slippery of slopes for a number of reasons.  The most dangerous implication being that a handful of officials can decide for the entire population of their states (or the entire population of the country) what leaders they are allowed to vote for based on a “guilty until proven innocent” ideology.

Meaning, all they have to do is make accusations of criminal behavior or criminal intent and then remove a candidate based on those accusations alone. 

No person or group should have that power.

One could argue that this is already the case and that the two party system filters out candidates on a regular basis.  However, the notion of state ballot removal is a decidedly leftist/Democrat affair clearly engineered to benefit the progressive power structure for many years to come. 

It’s not only about Donald Trump – Woke bureaucrats could use this trend in the future to deny ballot access to any conservative candidate on the grounds that they “might” represent a “threat to Democracy.”

This is essentially the message conveyed by Secretary of State Sheena Bellows, now well known as the person responsible for single-handedly removing Trump from the 2024 election ballot in Maine. 

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Was the Capitol Riot an ‘Insurrection,’ and Did Trump ‘Engage in’ It?

“It’s self-evident,” President Joe Biden told reporters on Wednesday. “You saw it all. He certainly supported an insurrection. No question about it. None. Zero.”

Biden was referring to the Colorado Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Donald Trump is disqualified from that state’s presidential primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was originally aimed at barring former Confederates from returning to public office after the Civil War. As relevant here, Section 3 says “no person shall…hold any office, civil or military, under the United States…who, having previously taken an oath…as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”

Biden, whose reelection bid would get a big boost from Trump’s disqualification, takes it for granted that the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol qualified as an “insurrection” under the 14th Amendment, and he says there is “no question” that Trump “engaged in” that insurrection. But the Colorado Supreme Court’s reasoning on both of those crucial points is iffy, and I say that as someone who thought Trump richly deserved his second impeachment, which was provoked by his reckless behavior before and during the riot.

On its face, that impeachment supports the court’s decision, which was joined by four of seven justices. The article of impeachment, after all, charged Trump with “incitement of insurrection” and explicitly cited Section 3. But that debatable characterization was not necessary to show that Trump was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Trump’s misconduct included his refusal to accept Biden’s victory, his persistent peddling of his stolen-election fantasy, his pressure on state and federal officials to embrace that fantasy, the incendiary speech he delivered to his supporters before the riot, and his failure to intervene after a couple thousand of those supporters invaded the Capitol, interrupting the congressional ratification of the election results. All of that was more than enough to conclude that Trump had egregiously violated his oath to “faithfully execute” his office and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” It was more than enough to justify his conviction for high crimes and misdemeanors in the Senate, which would have prevented him from running for president again.

Achieving the same result under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, by contrast, does require concluding that Trump “engaged in insurrection.” But in reaching that conclusion, the Colorado Supreme Court never actually defines insurrection.

“At oral argument,” the opinion notes, “President Trump’s counsel, while not providing a specific definition, argued that an insurrection is more than a riot but less than a rebellion. We agree that an insurrection falls along a spectrum of related conduct.” But the court does not offer “a specific definition” either: “It suffices for us to conclude that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section Three would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”

That description suggests a level of intent and coordination that seems at odds with the chaotic reality of the Capitol riot. Some rioters were members of groups, such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, that thought the use of force was justified to keep Trump in office. But even in those cases, federal prosecutors had a hard time proving a specific conspiracy to “hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power” by interrupting the electoral vote tally on January 6. And the vast majority of rioters seem to have acted spontaneously, with no clear goal in mind other than expressing their outrage at an election outcome they believed was the product of massive fraud.

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The Velvet Fascism of “Protect our Democracy”

Deciding that a person who has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, insurrection is guilty of insurrection and therefore cannot run for president…that is “protecting our democracy” in action.

Whenever that term is used, one can be assured that the democracy they are referring to has no semblance to any actual democracy.

In this case, “ours” does not mean “all of ours” – it means “theirs.”

What they are protecting is their democracy; not a democracy of the people, but now merely a word used to fig leaf the ever-expanding slither of socialist socialite statism, the velvet fascism that is deftly hammering its way through the society and the culture.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruling disqualifying Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot there is absurd, legally indefensible, and a direct attack on the entire constitutional premise of the nation.

It eviscerates the basic right of the people to choose – however one may think of their choice – their own leader.

It torpedoes the idea of the balance of powers between the three branches of government. Until yesterday, judges have almost always steered clear of most election-related cases, in part because of that issue. In fact, the mantra that “Trump lost every challenge he made in court to the 2020 election” is true because, three years ago, courts did everything they could to not hear the cases – issues of standing, issues of timing, and issues well, what do you what me to do? Order a new vote? Few – if any – were heard on their merits.

The United States Supreme Court even ruled that a group of states did not have standing to sue states they thought mishandled the 2020 election. One would think a state would have standing in court to challenge how another state ran their elections because who is president impacts every state, but still the Supremes passed on even hearing an argument.

That is yet another reason this ruling is so mind-boggling dangerous – the precedent set is catastrophic to the point that the President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele was right when he tweeted “The United States has lost its ability to lecture any other country about ‘democracy’.”

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CNN Caught Editing RFK Jr Speech To Mislead Viewers

When he appeared on CNN last week, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was confronted with a video from one of his speeches — a video CNN clipped to convey a false impression that he had compared Covid restrictions to conditions in Nazi Germany. 

The dishonest ambush came on Dec. 15 as Kennedy was interviewed by former MSNBC anchor Kasie Hunt. Hunt showed a video of Kennedy speaking at a January 2022 rally in Washington, which includes a passage in which he said…

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

Today, the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.”  

Hunt had framed the clip to suggest Kennedy was specifically comparing Covid mandates to Hitler’s Germany.

As we’ll soon show, that was false.

In the passage from which the above excerpt was drawn, Kennedy was broadly addressing the rise of technology that threatens to enable a “turnkey totalitarianism” that would wildly surpass the capabilities of Hitler’s Nazi regime.   

To spice things up, Hunt next displayed a tweet from Kennedy’s own wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, which came a few days after the speech. 

At the time, Hines had been repeatedly nagged by NBC News reporter Ben Collins and others on social media asking if she stood by Kennedy’s remarks. She eventually folded and posted a tweet in which she threw her own husband under the bus, embracing the ridiculous, politically-correct notion — propped up by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League — that nobody’s allowed to compare anything to the Holocaust.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied Secret Service protection for 3rd time

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third request for Secret Service protection has been denied, according to a letter obtained by the Deseret News.

The letter, signed by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, says that USSS protection for Kennedy is “not warranted.” The letter’s veracity was confirmed Friday night by the Kennedy campaign.

“I have consulted with an advisory committee composed of the Speaker of the House, the House Minority Leader, the Senate Majority Leader, the Senate Minority Leader, and the Senate Sergeant at Arms,” Mayorkas wrote. “Based on the facts and the recommendation of the advisory committee, I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not warranted at this time.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

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Yielding to Temptation: Colorado’s Supreme Court Blocks Democracy to Bar Trump on the 2024 Ballot

The Colorado Supreme Court has issued an unsigned opinion, making history in the most chilling way possible. A divided court barred Donald Trump from appearing on the 2024 presidential ballot. 

For months, advocates have been filing without success in various states, looking for some court to sign off on a dangerous, novel theory under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. They finally found four receptive jurists on one of the bluest state supreme courts in the land.

Even on a court composed entirely of justices appointed by Democratic governors, Colorado’s Supreme Court split 4-3 on the question. The majority admitted that this was a case “of first impression” and that there was “sparse” authority on the question. Yet, the lack of precedent or clarity did not deter these justices from making new law to block Trump from running. Indeed, the most controlling precedent appears to be what might be called the Wilde Doctrine. 

In his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote that “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” The four Colorado justices just ridded themselves of the ultimate temptation and, in so doing, put this country on one of the most dangerous paths in its history.

The court majority used a long-dormant provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the “disqualification clause” — that was written after the Civil War to bar former Confederate members from serving in the U.S. Congress. 

In December 1865 many in Washington were shocked to see Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s onetime vice president, waiting to take the same oath that he took before joining the Southern rebellion. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had just died after whole states seceded into their own separate nation with its own army, navy, foreign policy and currency. So Congress declared that it could bar those “who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

January 6, 2021, was many things — and all of them bad. However, it was not an insurrection. I was critical of Trump’s speech to a mob of supporters that day, and I rejected his legal claims to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election in Congress. However, it was a protest that became a riot, not a rebellion.

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Google Experiments With “Faster and More Adaptable” Censorship of “Harmful” Content Ahead of 2024 US Elections

In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech engaged in unprecedented levels of election censorship, most notably by censoring the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before voters went to the polls.

And with the 2024 US presidential election less than a year away, both Google and its video sharing platform, YouTube, have confirmed that they plan to censor content they deem to be “harmful” in the run-up to the election.

In its announcement, Google noted that it already censors content that it deems to be “manipulated media” or “hate and harassment” — two broad, subjective terms that have been used by tech giants to justify mass censorship.

However, ahead of 2024, the tech giant has started using large language models (LLMs) to experiment with “building faster and more adaptable” censorship systems that will allow it to “take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”

Google will also be censoring election-related responses in Bard (its generative AI chatbot) and Search Generative Experience (its generative AI search results).

In addition to these censorship measures, Google will be continuing its long-standing practice of artificially boosting content that it deems to be “authoritative” in Google Search and Google News. While this tactic doesn’t result in the removal of content, it can result in disfavored narratives being suppressed and drowned out by these so-called authoritative sources, which are mostly pre-selected legacy media outlets.

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Narrative vs. Reality

As the march towards election day 2024 approaches, the narratives that define the election season take shape now. The current battle is over the economic narrative. Journalists and pundits are disturbed that Americans do not realize how things are better today than they were in January of 2021. Why can the plebeians not see the contorted statistical truth? This is part of the failed return to normalcy narrative that was the sales pitch in 2020, but it is one that the managerial class is not a monolith on and this makes the most loyal regime elements upset. This gap between message and reality on the ground is an issue and will be a growing issue as the regime is desperate for legitimacy.

In the complex tapestry of political regimes, the manipulation of economic statistics stands as a formidable tool for those seeking to maintain a facade of stability and control. China’s statistics have been mocked for years as detached from reality or unreliable in an effort to sell to Chinese citizens and potential foreign clients that everything is growing fast. The CCP has delivered to millions, but maybe not as fantastic as they proclaim. We can see the intricate interplay between questionable legitimacy and the strategic concealment of recessions, unraveling the motives behind such actions and their profound implications for both governance and the governed.

At the heart of this deceptive play lies the inherent connection between economic performance and political legitimacy. A regime faced with doubts about its mandate to govern may resort to fabricating economic indicators to project an image of prosperity. By doing so, it seeks to bolster public confidence, portraying itself as a capable steward of the nation’s well-being. At this point in American history with the gulf between the ideology of the governing class and nearly half of its internal subjects, delivering on prosperity is a major support for their continued rule.

One primary motive for such manipulation is the fear of unrest and dissent. A government with questionable legitimacy understands that economic downturns can serve as potent catalysts for public discontent. A recession brings with it rising unemployment, falling incomes, and a general sense of insecurity. By concealing the true extent of economic challenges, the regime attempts to maintain a semblance of normalcy, suppressing the potential for mass protests or calls for political change. Americans know the federal government will jail those who walk around the Capitol during a riot, but could they throw thousands more into jail for basic protests.

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RFK, Ramaswamy And Williamson Push Psychedelics Reform On Presidential Campaign Trail

Democratic, Republican and independent 2024 presidential candidates might disagree on many major political issues, but three hopefuls have each recently used their platform on the campaign trail to promote their visions for psychedelics reform.

Marianne Williamson, who is running for the Democratic nomination against incumbent President Joe Biden, has released a comprehensive drug policy platform that broadly condemns prohibition, pledging to legalize “less harmful drugs” including marijuana and psilocybin while providing free access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to treat drug addiction.

Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy reaffirmed his more modest position last week, calling for the decriminalization of ayahuasca and ketamine for military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to mitigate the suicide crisis.

Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who left the Democratic primary to run as an independent candidate, is sharing why he’s embraced allowing access to psychedelics for mental health treatment, describing how his son’s experience with ayahuasca helped him process the death of his mother.

It’s a uniquely 2024 commonality among the otherwise divided candidates, underscoring the increased bipartisan interest in exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.

Each candidate had previously expressed support for psychedelics reform, but recent statements and campaign materials add context to how they view the issue and how they envision implementing change if they beat the political odds to get elected to the White House.

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Biden campaign REFUSES to commit to the 2024 presidential debates: Top official says they will look at 81-year-old’s schedule and will have ‘conversations’

A top Biden campaign official was noncommittal on Wednesday about President Joe Biden participating in the general election debates.

Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager for the Biden-Harris campaign, was asked if the president was committed to participating now that the the Commission on Presidential Debates released a schedule.

Fulks, former Democratic Alabama Sen. Doug Jones and Alabama state Rep. Barbara Drummond held a press conference in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where the fourth Republican primary debate will be held on the University of Alabama’s campus later Wednesday night.  

‘At the end of the day, we’re focused on building a campaign. We’ll have those conversations,’ Fulks said. 

When a reporter pointed out that sounded like a ‘no,’ Fulks revised his statement but still didn’t commit Biden to participate in the trio of the debates scheduled.

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