democracy
“And when I was 12 years old, my daddy took me to the circus.
There were clowns and elephants, dancing bears.
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads.
As I sat there watching,
I had the feeling that something was missing.
I don’t know what.
When it was over I said to myself,
‘Is that all there is to a circus?’
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing.
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.
If that’s all,
There is.”
I intentionally did not capitalize the word “democracy” in the title of this missive in order to distinguish the true meaning of the word from the many capitalized uses it has including it’s use on the name of one of the two major political parties in the United States.
According to a 1975 printing of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (contemporary dictionaries are almost all woke and worthless), democracy is derived from the greek word demokratia which literally means “rule by the people.” It goes on to say “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation involving periodic free elections.”
I’m sure you already knew that.
But the word is used to give an illusion of democracy to many things that are decidedly undemocratic. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is a brutal, murderous, corrupt dictatorship that is neither democratic nor a republic. The actual name of what we know as North Korea is The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Every word of that (except for Korea) is a lie. There are many, many more examples where authoritarian regimes try to give themselves an air of respectability in the freedom loving world by using, and I would argue, abusing this word.
The Democratic Party in the United States is abusing the word in much the same way these days. Every appeal from the Harris campaign and other Democrats always starts with abortion and “saving our democracy” as their two major planks. The “democracy” plank is entirely hinged on their mischaracterization of January 6th as a “bloody insurrection” and the “greatest threat to democracy since the civil war.” January 6th was an embarrassment for sure and Speaker Pelosi, amongst others share blame for letting it get out of hand. But it was less of an insurrection than the takeover of parts of Seattle and Portland during the BLM and ANTIFA riots where they actually declared themselves to be a separate country. Of course, regime media has buried those stories never to be seen again.
The Democratic party’s “democracy” claims are total unadulterated crap. But let’s look at what their party is doing.
One of the tenets of our democracy is one person, one vote. It is pretty fundamental that every single citizen has the same right and the same vote as every other. No more, no less.
But ballot harvesting, allows a single individual to vote not just twice, but in some cases thousands of times by picking up unused mail-in ballots and filling them out and voting them. Many red states try to prevent this. The worst offenders are California and Oregon where they literally automatically mail ballots to the entire voter roll including to people who are dead or have moved out of state. When a non-citizen votes or a someone votes another person’s ballot who may or may not be eligible to vote, it is the same as denying a legitimate person their vote, because it has been effectively “cancelled out.”
The Democrats support all this nonsense using the argument that they do not want any barriers (like showing ID or even registration) to vote. That is another lie. I spoke to several of my Democrat colleagues while I was in office about this subject and asking how any reasonable person could justify making fraud so easy. The response was always the same. They told me that you Republicans always vote in high percentages but our constituencies are poor, indigent or not English speakers and they don’t vote in the same percentages. Vote harvesting gives those constituencies a voice, they said. I responded by pointing out that by voting for those people, you are assuming that they will always vote for you and your causes. You can’t know that. They responded that of course they would vote Dem across the board because Dems care about them and Republicans don’t. My protestations about that claim fell on deaf ears.
That is their moral justification for eliminating one vote per citizen and thereby wrecking democracy. You can only have government by the people if the votes are made by the people, not by a ruling elite (I will use Joe Biden’s words here) who choose for them. That is definitionally authoritarian government and that is what the Democratic Party stands for today, in part because they would have difficulty winning otherwise.
Additionally, the enormous power of administrative state (deep state) is also anti-democratic as these people are unelected and protected by civil service and therefore are completely out of reach of any accountability to the people. There is nothing any of us can do to stop them. As we have seen, they are willing to ignore even rulings from the Supreme Court and just go about their way as if they were kings. Because in a great sense, they are.
Donald Trump, to his credit, has discussed trying to dismantle the administrative state and protect the right to vote for yourself. In my opinion, it is Republicans saving democracy here and we should not allow Democrats to hold that political ground when their policies are decidedly undemocratic.
Kamala, Part Deux: It now appears that Ms. Harris will announce a VP choice next week. The regime media will fawn over that choice. Then the following week will be their convention and each party always gets a bounce after a week of unity and singing and self-congratulatory speeches.
After that, I expect the polls to be basically tied. Early voting starts in some states less than 30 days after the Dem convention. The campaign will really heat up during those 30 days and after.
Kamala is a terrible candidate and is an unappealing persona as I explained last week. If her campaign people are smart, I expect they will hide her as they did with Biden in 2020 and bring her out only for carefully scripted speeches and interviews with friendly media and pre-screened questions. They will count on Mr. Trump to say some stupid things, which he continues to do, since nobody can or ever will script him. Barring a “black swan” type event that sways it one way or another, this thing is going to be close.
The Senate, however, still looks likely to flip to GOP control.
Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation is one of a number of privately funded conservative think tanks. There are plenty on the left as well. All of these think tanks study issues and come up with policy papers describing their views on how to solve various problems through the lens of their particular ideology. If anyone has influence over these think tanks, it is the people who fund them. When I was in Congress, I would often read what Heritage had produced because they had smart people doing in depth work. Sometimes I agreed with them, sometimes not. One freedom that think tanks have which we in elected office do not, is that they can ignore the political popularity of their proposals and simply suggest what they think is best because they do not face an electorate every two years.
The Biden and now Harris campaigns targeted this 1000 page product of the Heritage Foundation because there are undoubtedly statements in there that are unpopular. That will be the case of any paper by any think tank, right or left, for reasons I outlined in the paragraph above. The Harris campaign tied this to Trump even though he had nothing to do with it’s creation, and the regime media cut and pasted the Dem talking points into their stories. There is no question that think tanks create these to try and influence policy. But no think tank’s product is a campaign product unless the campaign adopts it.
The president of the Heritage Foundation has been forced to resign as a result of all of this criticism. I don’t know him, but I think that is terrible. The whole purpose of think tanks is to give analysis of policy, uninfluenced by political and media forces. Losing that would be another major loss of thoughtfulness, freedom and critical analysis that makes this a lesser country, thanks to regime media and the Biden/Harris campaign.
The song I chose today was half spoken and half sung and was a hit in 1969 and became a part of the TV series Mad Men to incapsulate “is that all there is” when its leading characters got what they wanted and it wasn’t enough. I used it today to illustrate the Democrat’s platform. Free Abortions and orange man bad. That’s really it. It makes me think, is that all there is? The answer, of course, is no. But they can’t tell you their plans for the economy, border, taxes, foreign affairs, debt, voting, education or anything else because the people don’t want any of that.
Sometimes, I wish that really was all there is.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free