Monthly Archives: January 2021

It is time to move on.

Donald Trumps utility for conservatives is expiring along with his presidency. The Senate runoffs are done, the stunts objecting to the electoral results have come to nothing, and it is time for those who supported the soon-to-be former-President Trump for reasons of policy, not personality, to bid him farewell.

For those whose support for Trump was transactional, this is an easy decision, like replacing a broken tool. We got on the Trump train at different times and for different reasons judges, tax cuts, a chance to shake up the Republican Party, the Democrats being awful but its time to exit.

He was a means to an end, and we do not need to stick with him when he can no longer serve our ends. Those who wanted Trump to, say, appoint Federalist Society judges and disrupt Zombie Reaganism should take our wins and cash out.

A prudential deal to support Trump in exchange for results is not an oath to be Forever Trump. Indeed, wanting Trump to remain the face of the Republican franchise, or perhaps to pass the mantle down to his children is an awful idea.

Although Trump helped clear the way for the future of the GOP as a party more focused on working families, he was often more talk (or tweet) than action let alone results. His personality was so toxic that a record number of voters came out against him. Thus, Trump will soon be one more former politician scrambling to retain his political influence.

Republican candidates may still want Trumps endorsement and fundraising help, but he will have nothing to offer to voters. His devoted fans may pine for him to run again in 2024, but Republicans should look for someone better.

That we can do better is presumed in the justification frequently offered for supporting Trump, which is that he was the lesser evil. Now that it is no longer a choice between Trump and the Democrats, an array of options has opened up and we should look them over with a fine-toothed comb. To be sure, we can move beyond Trump without returning to the decadent status quo he disrupted.

Trumps flaws are still there, but the favors he can offer us are gone unless he wins another election. Furthermore, Trumps flaws were often politically self-sabotaging, making the odds of him ever winning again slim.

Consider Trumps behavior since the election. He claims that he lost due to massive election fraud but his lawyers have not substantiated his claims in court (even in front of judges that he selected), and his ideas for challenging the results were increasingly unconstitutional.

His threats to campaign against Georgia Republicans he deemed insufficiently supportive of these schemes during runoff elections to determine control of the Senate! reveal Trump to be a malicious man who puts his wounded ego before the good of the party he leads.

In politics, winning can cover a multitude of sins, but Trump is not a winner anymore, in part because his response to his own loss led to more Republicans losing. Trumps egotistical insistence that Georgia was rigged against him may well have been what cost Republicans the Senate. It is no surprise that Republican turnout was down, especially in the most Trump-friendly areas: why should voters bother to turn out for another rigged election?

Trump ended his time in office by betraying his own voters and by selling them conspiracies about how their votes had not been counted in the last race, which presumably means they would not be counted in the next one. Ultimately, his ego and lack of discipline were crucial in giving Democrats unified control of the elected branches.

It will be a hard two years of legislative defeats, and a bad four years of executive orders, all of which will rachet up the culture war battles ever further. Nonetheless, conservatives should not despair. The margins the Democrats have to deal with are slim, which will exacerbate their own internal tensions. Republicans can win the next elections if they can unite, but Trump is not the leader for that task.

Although the policy concerns of dedicated Trump voters should be addressed, it would be folly for the party to remain in thrall to a defeated politician who unites and motivates Democrats while alienating enough Republicans to lose.

They may not like it, but the populist and establishment wings of the GOP need each other to win. They must work together as a coalition, rather than trying to raze each other to the ground both Trumps most ardent GOP fans and foes share a penchant for threatening to burn the party down if they dont get their way. Trumps propensity for assailing Republicans who displease him adds fuel to this fire, especially given his mercurial and sometimes impossible demands.

Trump is too unstable to build and sustain a winning Republican coalition. If the GOP is going to become a viable populist party, it needs someone more competent and moral than Trump to lead it. He is going out as a conspiracy-theorist loser who stoked riots attacking the capitol. This should be the end of Trump; the auditions to replace him begin now.

Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.

Photo Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

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To Win In The Future, Republicans Need To Move On From Trump - The Federalist

The presidential election was close. Only 84 Electoral College votes separated the contenders. Widespread allegations of ballot fraud were claimed by national party chairmen in 11 states, with court challenges lasting into the middle of the year following the election. Changing the results in just two states would flip the election.

The fraud allegations were serious, including dead people voting and votes far in excess of registered voters in some counties. Yet partisan election boards quickly certified the results while local judges, loyal to the political machines that installed them, threw out legal challenges. Eventually, 650 people were charged with election fraud, but only three were convicted, all given short sentences.

No, this isnt a story about 2020. Its a story of 1960. U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy defeated two-term Vice President Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election by 303 to 219 electoral votes (with 15 ballots going to Sen. Harry F. Byrd). Nixon lost Illinois by 8,858 votes and Texas by 46,257. Had those two narrow losses been overturned, Nixon would have won and America might not have fought and lost the Vietnam War.

Since 1960, a myth has grown up around Nixon: that as a statesman, he decided not to challenge the results so as not to divide the nation. Even so, the Republican National Committee contested the results in the courts until mid-1961.

It was more likely that Nixon knew there was no practical path to overturning the results, clear evidence of fraud or not. That Nixon played the statesman was a convenient myth for all parties involved.

The election of 1876 was even more contentious, with Congress exercising its constitutional role as an arbiter of competing electoral slates sent by the states. Then, as now, the national climate was unsettled. The victorious North was weary of maintaining a standing army in the South.

In the years after the Civil War, some 1,500 black office holders, most recently freed slaves, were elected or appointed, mostly in the South. They held federal and state offices in all 11 of the states that constituted the core of the Confederacy. President Grant won reelection in 1872, prevailing in all but three of the 11 states of the old ConfederacyGeorgia, Tennessee, and Texaswith the votes of black Republicans.

But four years later, as federal troops were being drawn down, the Ku Klux Klan emerged as a terrorist tool of the Democratic Party, driving black Republicans out of office and voters away from the polls. When combined with poll taxes that charged the equivalent of about $20 for the right to vote, literacy tests, and official intimidation, large numbers of black Republicans were prevented from voting.

There was still a viable Republican Party apparatus in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina to claim victory, although the Democrats also forwarded competing slates of electors backed by a Democrat winning the governorship in Florida, with two disputed gubernatorial elections in Louisiana and South Carolina that saw the Democratic candidates installed after the presidential electors were assigned to Rutherford B. Hayes.

In the end, rather than risk losing a messy battle over the competing electoral slates, Republicans struck a devils bargain, formally agreeing to end Reconstruction in exchange for the presidency. Mechanically, the constitutional crisis was resolved through a bipartisan Electoral Commission, as the Constitution is silent on exactly how Electoral College disputes should be settled.

This constitutional silence appears to be a major oversight. The Founders, skeptical of politicians wielding power at the expense of the peoples liberty, set up a system of divided governmentthree national, co-equal branches along with the statesin a federal system.

Given that most of the Founders concern over the erosion of liberty was aimed at the national government, there was little direction given over how the electors were to be selected beyond three paragraphs in Article II, Section 1. Simply put, these paragraphs specify that state legislatures determine the manner of the electors appointment and that Congress determines both the election day and the day the electors vote.

Absent in this process is any sort of a check on the states. What if a states electoral system is corrupted? What if big city or regional political machines shift the election outcome, as was alleged in 1960 and 1876?

The courts have proven to be a notoriously ineffective check against election fraud. Prior to an election, when much of the advance work needed to cheat is accomplished, the courts will generally find a lack of standing, as no harm has yet been done. After a corrupted election, courts will shrug and say the point is mootthe election is already over. As with impeachment, the question appears to be political.

Two relevant lawsuits in the 2020 contest illustrate this principle. Texas filed a lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin as being tainted by sidestepping state election laws. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the case, merely stating that, Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.

The second lawsuit was brought in Pennsylvania, where it was contended that a statute, 2019s Act 77, allowing a huge expansion in mail-in voting, violated the states constitution. After the state supreme court rejected the argument more on process than substance, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

This leads to a pressing concern. How can illegalities reasonably be proved in the 79 days from Election Day to Inauguration Dayor, more urgently, the 35 days to Dec. 8, the Safe Harbor deadline for resolving any controversies over electors and electoral votes? Proving election-changing fraud in a mere five weeks, typically in the face of a state political apparatus that is loath to admit error or fraud or, worse yet, was an active participant in it, is difficult at best and, in a practical sense, impossible.

With courts unwilling to accept cases, the typical processes to validate an election come down to two means: recounts and audits. Recounts will, in most cases, simply recount any fraudulent votes and, on occasion, uncover genuine errors or simple attempts at cheating by transposing election returns, hiding ballot boxes, or counting some precincts twice. Audits, routinely done in many states, are a tool to validate that computerized machine counts match with any sort of paper backup the system may use.

Neither audits nor recounts will uncover traditional types of fraud such as aggressive harvesting of mail-in ballots, including from the deceased, those living under a guardianship due to mental incapacity, or people subject to pressure or inducements, such as small amounts of cash or access to a food pantry run by those connected to the local political machine.

We know that election fraud does occur in America, contrary to the repeated claims by Democrats and their allies in corporate and social media. In 2020, in New Jerseys third-largest city, Paterson, new municipal elections were ordered after massive and systemic vote-by-mail fraud was uncovered. A councilman, councilman-elect, and two others were charged with voting fraud. Also, in 2020 in nearby Philadelphia, former Democratic congressman Michael Ozzie Myers was charged with ballot-box stuffing over three years of elections, 2014, 2015, and 2016 by conspiring with and bribing a judge of elections.

We all saw the alarming and suspicious behavior of elections officials in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other areas where election observers were blocked or held back so far they were unable to monitor the counting, or were told to go home as counting was done for the night. COVID-19 also provided the excuse that people who stood in line to grocery shop could also not safely stand in line to votethus necessitating what was, in many swing states, a massive expansion in by-mail voting with a concurrent relaxing of safeguards, such as signature matching, designed to minimize fraud.

The opportunities for systemic cheating had never been greater in 60 years. The relevant legal question is, was it enough to change the election results? The practical question is, could election-changing fraud be proven in only 35 days?

Imagine if a well-placed elections official in Philadelphia came forward and admitted to significant election fraud and provided corroborating evidence. Would the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a Democrat-majority body thoroughly in the thrall of partisan politics, have acted? Would the Democrat governor or Democrat secretary of state have acted?

The legislature might have acted, but any electoral slate they put forward would have been superseded by the slate certified by the governor. Congress might have acted, but, at best, would have deadlocked, meaning the governors certified slate would prevail.

The aftermath of the 2020 election finds the nation unsettled, with legitimate concerns about election fraud overshadowed by the capitol riot and kooky conspiracy theories, such as the tale that U.S. Special Forces were killed in an operation to seize election-related computer servers operated by the CIA in Germany, where the agency was working to change votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

The original source of the rumor was said to be a tweet in German. The translated tweet was rapidly picked up and circulated by QAnon, an informal grouping of conspiracy theorists. Its probable the tweet was crafted by Russian or Chinese intelligence services with the express intent to increase distrust in U.S. institutions. At the very least, the unfounded rumor distracted from real efforts to uncover and prove election fraud.

Regarding the reprehensible riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6: had the declared election winner been reversed, theres no doubt the scale of the violence would have been far greater, while the media and elites would have supported it, as they did over last summers long season of discontent.

HR 1 has been reintroduced in the U.S. House. 2019s version passed the House and never received a vote in the Senate. It seeks to cement Democrat dominance of national elections by instituting a national voter registration program, making Election Day a federal holiday, requiring prepaid postage for mail-in ballots, criminalizing some forms of political speech, removing the power to redistrict from state legislatures, and eliminating the ability of state officials to maintain accurate and up-to-date voter lists.

Winning elections with fraud may be easy enough, but governing a people with vanishing trust in the system will be increasingly difficult. The nation would benefit from a thorough and honest review of the 2020 electionbut it almost surely wont happen.

Chuck DeVore is vice president of national initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and served in the California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010.

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The 2020 Election Aftermath Is Not At All Unprecedented In US History - The Federalist

Facebook and Instagram are banning President Donald Trump from their platforms beginning Thursday.

We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote.

Zuckerberg announced the decision on his own Facebook page, citing Wednesdays tumultuous, destructive events at the Capitol as one of the main reasons for the ban.

Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies, he wrote. We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech. But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.

Zuckerberg continued by claiming that the company needed to remove the president to ensure the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden. While the CEO claims the block will last for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete, he left the actual length of the ban open-ended.

Facebook previously announced on Wednesday that it would remove all photos and videos of the Capitol riots because they promoted criminal activity. This decision followed the big tech companys censorship and removal of Trumps video calling for peace and rule of law at the Capitol, claiming it instigated more violence.

His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world. We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect and likely their intent would be to provoke further violence, Zuckerberg wrote in his most recent statement.

Twitter also recently announced a 12-hour lock on Trumps account on Wednesday following a series of now-deleted posts that the company claimsviolated its Civic Integrity policy.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Facebook And Instagram Just Permabanned The US President - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Helen Andrews, senior editor at The American Conservative, joins Executive Editor Joy Pullmann to discuss her book Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster and how millennials can approach understanding their predecessors decisions and lifestyles.

Boomers thought they could remake the whole world, and it turned out that they did not, Andrews said, noting that certain economic and cultural decisions have left millennials feeling cheated. They are not God. They do not have a God-like power to recreate the world.

While most baby boomers have generational flaws that they have carried throughout their lifetimes, Andrews warned against generalizing individuals who do not fully fit the mold.

Its about what choices people make, Andrews said.

She also noted that millennials are just as susceptible to making the same mistakes and should try to avoid generational hypocrisy.

Something in me really revolts against people who show contempt for their predecessors when they are carrying on the same tradition, Andrews said. You are insulting your ancestors for the very thing that you are doing.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Why Millennials Love To Hate Boomers And Whether It's Deserved - The Federalist

In the months since Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, we've watched a barrage of efforts to reverse the result President Donald Trump launched rants, recounts, lawsuits, threats and now a violent insurrection at the Capitol aimed at disrupting congressional certification of the results. The denial and the chaos have been shocking. But are they unprecedented?

Not exactly. The very first contested presidential election, in 1800, was also chaotic. It too reflected ferocious partisanship, exposed problems in the electoral process and ended in a raucous congressional session in which the losers tried to flip the results. When it was all over, however, the winners reached for bipartisanship. And they fixed the broken process by bequeathing us the 12th Amendment, which still guides presidential elections right down to the step that turned unexpectedly explosive in 2021: "The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates [transmitted by the states] and the votes shall then be counted." But for all they did right, those early American leaders failed to confront the nation's deepest problem slavery.

In many ways, that election between Federalist President John Adams and Republican Vice President Thomas Jefferson resembled 2020. Seven (out of 16) states fiddled with the voting rules to boost their candidate Pennsylvania was so bitterly divided about its voting procedures that it almost missed the election. Each party thought the other dangerous the two sides believed they were fighting about nothing less than the nation's identity. The Federalists, based in New England, fretted about too much democracy, too many immigrants and seditious speech that could undermine the people's faith in their government. Republicans, based in the South, shot back that their rivals were nothing less than monarchists stifling free speech, repressing the people and endangering slavery by recognizing the Haitian rebels who had thrown off their bondage.

In the end, Jefferson easily won the popular vote and squeaked by in the electoral college. Then, the shenanigans began thanks to the rules governing the electoral college. The Constitution clearly stated that the person with the most votes would be president, the runner-up vice president. But in 1800, the political parties which the men who wrote the Constitution did not see coming and roundly abhorred nominated tickets. Both Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, tallied the same number of votes. The election headed to the House of Representatives which might have simply certified Jefferson as president and Burr as VP. But the defeated Federalists tried to steal a victory by flipping the ticket, rallying around Burr and trying to boost him into the presidency. After all, they reasoned, Burr was an expedient politician who would defect to the party that thrust him into power.

In the House of Representatives each state would cast a single vote a majority (nine states) would secure the presidency. The House voted. And voted. And voted again. Each time, the sitting vice president none other than Jefferson himself tallied the same result: Eight states for Jefferson. Six for Burr. Two abstained (because their delegations were evenly divided between the parties). Jefferson, one agonizing state short of victory, saw "dismay and gloom." Six different state delegations were divided by a single vote and the Federalists could reach a majority by flipping just three strategically-placed Republicans.

To make matters worse, the government had moved in 1800 from the large, cosmopolitan city of Philadelphia to the grim village of Washington, D.C., which amounted to little more than a few rude taverns and boardinghouses. Tree stumps marked the muddy path between the executive building and the half-constructed capitol building. "We want nothing here," wrote New York's Gouverneur Morris sarcastically, "but houses, cellars, kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of this kind to make our city perfect." There was nothing to do but drink, gamble and conspire.

Through the process, Alexander Hamilton, the most influential Federalist, broke with his party and scribbled one letter after another denouncing Aaron Burr. The two men knew each other well for they had battled in New York for years. Now Hamilton warned that Burr had no principles at all just a simple lust for power. He would be a despot.

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Finally on the 36th ballot, Federalist James Bayard of Maryland, after three letters from Hamilton, cast a blank ballot which broke the state's four-four tie and flipped it into Jefferson's column. Other Federalists followed his lead and Jefferson finally took the office he had won at the polls.

All that rigmarole from long ago broadcasts important lessons to our own time.

After 1800, leaders quickly adjusted the Constitution by adding the 12th Amendment. Electors would now cast separate ballots for president and vice president to prevent a tie and then transmit the results to Washington. Procedural fixes helped prevent the problems that had beset the 1800 election.

But, there was a deeper issue they didn't resolve slavery. The Federalists seized on it as a way to attack the new administration. They groused that Jefferson had won the election only because the Constitution inflated the power of his Southern base through the notorious three-fifths clause that helped allocate electoral votes. Jefferson "rode into the temple of liberty upon the shoulders of slaves," as one Connecticut newspaper put it.

The volcanic issue was only beginning to rumble. Some Federalists denounced slavery, others took the opposite tack and warned that the Republicans imperiled the institution with all their talk about the rights of man. The losers were more focused on resisting Jefferson's political power then in engaging the issue itself. The deepest national problem festered and grew till, less than two decades later, an aging Jefferson thought he heard the passions over slavery tolling the "knell of the union."

Today, a deep partisan division once again spurred an effort to overthrow the presidential election. And like that long ago contested election in 1800, we too risk letting our political differences obscure deep national problems: More than two centuries later, the race line remains raw and marked by injustice. We face an economic inequality that has soared to levels unmatched among wealthy democracies. We confront a ferocious urban/rural rift and a burning planet. A deeply divided Washington reflecting a deeply divided nation has a lot of work to do. The final lesson from 1800: We ignore the big problems at our peril.

Morone is a professor of political science at Brown University and the author of "Republic of Wrath: How American Politics Turned Tribal from George Washington to Donald Trump." This piece was written for The Washington Post.

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The election that foreshadowed 2020 - Newsday

Big techs abuse of market power has permitted it to not only destroy their competition but also to silence conservatives, according to The Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech

This is obviously a collusive action on the part of these incredibly powerful entities who are seeking to not just destroy their competition, but effectively to silence people who are supporters of the president online, Domenech told Fox News Fox & Friends on Sunday.

Domenech pointed to Amazon, Google, and Apple in removing Parler from their platforms after the storming of the Capitol Building this week.

You wouldnt want to see, in a capitalist system, cutting off customer bases or undermining them, preventing them from accessing your products, Domenech said. But that really doesnt take on as much power as an argument when youve got control of 99% of the market as you do within Apple and Google controlling the dominant portion of the OS market for phones.

I think people are basically saying, Fine, go build your own phone network, go build your own operating system, go build your own app store, which is, of course, a ridiculous thing to argue, he continued. But its also one of the things I think big tech is going to be doing more and more of in the coming months as they crush not just the president himself, but a lot of his supporters and everything that they run to and every app that they go and find as a substitute for this.

This reeks of Chinese Communist Party strategy, he added.

What youre really seeing here is big tech doing what the Constitution prevents the government from doing: an enforcement of a social standard in America, he said.

Its very akin of what you have in terms of a social credit system in China. Its just that over there, the rules are kind of clear. Here they can change the terms of service whenever they want. None of the standards actually are actually serious. They really come down to, If we dont like you, were going to get rid of you and well find a reason for why.'

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Federalist Publisher: Big Tech Colluding to Destroy Conservative Speech - WBAP News/Talk

The Capitol Hill riot was an inexcusable, pathetic, and disgraceful display. Its consequences will extend well beyond the bloodshed and property damage inflicted by those who shamefully acceded to the lefts view that force is legitimate means of persuasion exhibited repeatedly via the lefts normalization of political incitement and violence throughout President Trumps term in office.

The riot not only overshadowed the corruption that marked the 2020 election and undermined the MAGA movements people and principles, but set up Americans of all political stripes for an onslaught on their rights and cherished freedoms.The riot was an accelerant for what was already likely planned under Democrat rule in Washington: crushing dissenters from its leftist orthodoxy as part of an effort to achieve total power by disenfranchising the opposition.

President Trump has personified this dissent, but the effort to delegitimize, de-platform, and ultimately destroy him and anyone around him is merely the opening scene of the Godfather-like settling of scores with all who threaten the ruling classs power and privilege.This effort will directly harm not just the thousands of peaceful patriots who had descended on Washington D.C., and their tens of millions of like-minded neighbors across the country, but all Americans.

The coming crackdown on dissenters in the political realm was pre-ordained in the wee hours of Jan. 6, when both Georgia Senate seats flipped to the Democrats. Now, should Senate Democrats successfully blow up the filibuster, they will work to pass an agenda in which any one item, let alone all, could put Democrats in a virtually unshakeable control of the federal government for years to come.

They have made no secret of their agenda, which includes such items as mass amnesty for illegal aliens, statehood for Washington, D.C., statehood for Puerto Rico, and federal enshrinement of mail-in voting through a re-upped H.R. 1. Needless to say, total leftist political control will erode liberty and justice, and be used to target dissenters in cruel and unusual ways.

In the near-term, the Capitol Hill riot has served as a pretext for other corrosive political acts: calls for the 25th Amendment to remove a sitting president, a second impeachment vote; consultations between the speaker of the House and the Pentagon about preventing the president from accessing the nuclear codes and discharging his other duties; and calls by our national security and legal apparatus against conservatives and their speech all under the pretense of combatting domestic terrorism and punishing incitement.

This is not purely an issue of politics, for it will encompass all of civil society. The coming assault on dissenters will play out in arenas that far transcend our increasingly unrepresentative government.

Its adjuncts in big tech, woke capital, corporate media, and beyond have already started participating in the purge, of their own volition, in a continuation of the anti-cultural revolution of summer 2020. It is nothing less than the weaponization of civil society institutions against political dissenters, in conjunction with and often indirectly supported by the state. Americans are now primed to punish their fellow Americans for Wrongthink to a greater extent than we have seen before.

It will go far beyond banning the president of the United States from major social media platforms, purging countless like-minded voices, and stymieing their alternative means of communication. It will go far beyond pulling a U.S. senators publishing deal. It will go far beyond even firing people purportedly acting peacefully at political rallies.Ultimately, it will extend across every aspect of the digital world, and affect real life as well.

Yes, we are headed towards something like Chinas Great Firewall, where, albeit without the power of a government gun, big tech will silence speech that challenges the ruling classs official narratives, disappear the digital profiles of those who run afoul of its ever-changing terms of service, and take down websites where alternative ideas might proliferate.

More chilling is this thought: What is to stop the crackdown from going beyond communications to where and how you can work, bank, travel, eat, shop, obtain health insurance, and send your kids to school?

Think, for a second, about everything you do in daily life. Consider how reliant you are on goods and services controlled by entities in whole or in part run by executives who either hate your political views or think they can survive by currying favor with those who are contemptuous.

The left has already said it is making lists to prevent Trump administration personnel from getting jobs in the private sector. Whats to stop them or their allies in the media and corporate America from doing the same to any of us?

Is there any apparent limiting principle that will keep us from developing a CCP-style social credit system with Western characteristics as my Federalist colleague Sumantra Maitra has put it whereby private enterprises grade us on ideology and determine what we can and cannot do based on how closely we hew to its ideology?

In a world where politics has become all-pervasive, virtue-signaling demands not only disavowing but punishing the 74 million enablers of what the left has been asserting for years is Nazism. As in so many other matters, they have been projecting onto the right what the left itself endorses.

If you accede to the view that anything that challenges the prevailing progressive orthodoxy constitutes violence, then you will take any means necessary to snuff it out. There are an awful lot of true believers, useful idiots, cynics, and cowed people across American life seemingly willing to adhere to such a principle. It will likely push us to ideological segregation, which will only further fuel hostilities, strife, and chaos.

Americas Cold Civil War will only heat up as those with all the power take precisely the wrong lessons from the Capitol Hill riot and, rather than seeking to represent millions of Americans and address their concerns, simply chooses to punish or silence them.

Ben Weingarten is a Federalist senior contributor, senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and fellow at the Claremont Institute. He was selected as a 2019 Robert Novak Journalism fellow of the Fund for American Studies, under which he is currently working on a book on U.S.-China policy. You can find his work at benweingarten.com, and follow him on Twitter @bhweingarten.

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Democrats Are Using The Recent Capitol Riot To Consolidate Power - The Federalist

A trio of House Democrats are blaming Republicans for their infection with the novel Wuhan coronavirus this month after testing positive following a brief stay in the Capitol bunker amid last weeks riot.

Today, I am now in strict isolation, worried that I have risked my wifes health and angry at the selfishness and arrogance of the anti-maskers who put their own contempt and disregard for decency ahead of the health of colleagues, Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider of Illinois said, admonishing Republican colleagues he charged with not wearing a mask at their secure location.

Democratic Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey, 75, also blamed Republicans for her own positive test result in an op-ed in the Washington Post. So too did Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, claiming Republicans created a superspreader event, through their noncompliance to wear masks. Jayapal said this without considering whether she had contracted the virus in the House gallery when she was surrounded by others in close quarters without wearing a mask herself, as shown in the video below:

Theres little evidence, however, to suggest maskless Republicans infected any one of the three positive members, let alone each in the Capitol bunker. Though its unknown whether any Republican members might have been carrying the virus asymptomatically at the time of the Capitol riots, no GOP lawmakers had been confirmed to be infected. One of the few Republican representatives infected amid the chaos was Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady, who confirmed to The Federalist that he was not present at the Capitol, having announced that day, prior to the demonstrations, that he was COVID-19-positive.

The trio of Democrats placing baseless blame on Republicans for their infections also turns a blind eye to Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Gwen Moore having appeared to break the CDC-recommended quarantine period to fly in for the speakership vote re-electing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Moore announced on Dec. 28 that she had tested positive for the coronavirus and then six days later flew to Washington, D.C., for the vote.

While declaring herself medically cleared to travel, the Wisconsin lawmaker did not disclose whether she had undergone a negative COVID-19 test prior to the trip.

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stipulate a minimum of 10-day isolation for individuals infected with COVID-19, regardless of whether the person has symptoms. Symptomatic cases should remain isolated until 10 days after the start of their symptoms and are to go 24 hours without having a fever before public re-entry. The CDC says even asymptomatic positive cases should isolate until 10 days after getting their test.

Moore was not one of the three lawmakers, each of whom had tested negative but were still within CDC quarantine windows, who voted with special arrangements for the House speaker.

Moores office released a statement several days after the vote, declaring the representative had tested positive on Dec. 22 and was therefore not violating CDC guidelines. Moores office did not respond to The Federalists repeated inquiries as to whether Moore had ever received a negative test following her positive one, nor did they respond with proof that she had tested positive on Dec. 22, with her statement having been released days after news of her trip sparked controversy.

Could Moore then have caused a congressional coronavirus outbreak because Pelosi needed every vote in for the speakership?

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Dems With COVID Voted For Pelosi, Then Blamed GOP For Infections - The Federalist