"Another door slams shut on democracy" by Melanie Phillips

 

Another door slams shut on democracy Has there ever been such a perilous moment for the US as its post-election struggle? Melanie Phillips Dec 10 Mount Rushmore monument: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln The situation now is beyond surreal. There are, at the very least, strong suspicions that the US presidential election was corrupted so badly that victory was stolen from President Donald Trump and handed instead to his challenger, Joe Biden. Yet YouTube has announced that it will immediately start removing content relating to alleged “widespread fraud or errors” that took place. So at the very moment that this evidence needs to be thoroughly aired and tested, YouTube will prevent us from even seeing anything about it. Regular readers will know that I have been expressing repeated concern about these mounting claims of election fraud. While it would be premature to conclude from them that the election was indeed fraudulent, and while these claims of irregularities may all turn out to have a reasonable explanation, the allegations are too widespread, too systematic and too serious to be brushed aside. They need to be thoroughly investigated.  There are still legal challenges pending, including one to the Supreme Court involving a number of states.  As Roger Kimball has written:  “…stray ballots started turning up, analysis revealed massive statistical anomalies in voter turnout, the size and timing of votes for Joe Biden, and other irregularities. There were troubling videos of Democratic vote counters pulling out hidden suitcases of ballots after they kicked the GOP observers out of the room, for example. Another seemed to show one Democratic worker surreptitiously hand a thumb drive to another minutes before a massive influx of votes appeared for Joe Biden. There have been scores of affidavits attesting to voter fraud and scarifying testimony from witnesses who reminded their questioners that they made their statements under penalty of perjury”.  John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, who has said foreign governments are using allegations of voter fraud to sow confusion in America, has also observed that the public needs reassurance about the integrity of the election. He said:  “I would hope that the leadership at the FBI and the Department of Justice would speak to those things, directly to the American people, because there is a lack of confidence there. There are a lot of people in this country who don’t think the votes were counted fairly. …“It’s not just one person or one group of people,” he said in the interview. “It’s across the country, and it’s little wonder because we have procedures we haven’t had before. This is what the court system is for.” Yet YouTube has decided that people should not be made aware of any of this, on the grounds that “enough states have certified their election results to determine a president-elect”. Accordingly, anything that casts doubt upon the integrity of this process is to be deemed false and misleading. YouTube thus dismisses the need for the democratic safeguard provided by the courts, and overrides the safeguard of public scrutiny — on the basis that no-one should be allowed to see anything YouTube deems false and misleading. Which merely amounts to their own, highly tendentious and contestable opinion. This is the kind of behaviour associated with totalitarian societies, dictatorships and banana republics. It is simply astounding to see this in the west. But it’s merely a sharper turn of the ratchet. After all, who can really be surprised, given what we have witnessed over the past four years? Some of these claims of voter fraud, such as the allegation that the Dominion voting machines were programmed to throw the election, seem outlandish and incredible. Yet who would have ever believed that there would have been a three-year rolling coup against the president of the United States, based on unfounded claims of collusion with Russia and conducted by individuals from the justice and law-enforcement administration in concert with certain members of the Democratic party? Yet such an attempt did take place. And many if not most in the west still remain unaware of this astonishing series of events because the mainstream media has refused to report it. Who would ever have thought that the mainstream media would actually have played instead a shameless and brazen part in the attempt to lever the president out of office, by a wholesale and sustained substitution of venomous propaganda for objective journalism? Yet this did take place. And this was simply because they thought he should never have been elected. They thought that their obsessional, spitting hatred of Trump entitled them to ignore and override the democratically expressed wishes of tens of millions of Americans who elected him under the provisions of the US constitution. Who would ever have thought that a former president of the United States would himself have totalitarian instincts and cheered all this on? Yet former president Barack Obama appears to believe that various views he finds so objectionable as to be incomprehensible should play no part in “the market-place of ideas” — by which he appears to mean a market-place only of opinions he finds acceptable. In an interview last month, he said: The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this… If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the market-place of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work… I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change. I can even accept somebody making an argument that, based on what I know about human nature, it’s too late to do anything serious about this. I don’t know what to say if you simply say, ‘This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books. Where do I start trying to figure out where to do something?’  Internet giants beyond YouTube also have a troubling record of censoring or labelling as fraudulent anything suggesting that Trump has been robbed of his rightful victory, as well as censoring or harassing providers of conservative content in general. The desire and ability of culture-war ideologues to shut down debate is spreading by the day. Given all this, it becomes less hard to believe not only that a presidential election could have been corrupted but also that the truth of this would be first ignored and then censored. For these reasons, most people are still unaware of these astonishing facts. In this way, the rule of law and the protections of a free society have been systematically abandoned over the past four years. But more and more people are realising this, regardless. Which is why Trump was elected in 2016. And it’s why people just won’t believe bland assurances that Biden won the presidency fair and square. They need to see these claims not being ignored and disdained but being properly investigated. As more and more doors slam shut on the western mind, such public distrust and resentment is lethal for democracy. Has there ever been such a perilous moment for America as this?