Daniel Greenfield January 28, 2021 Front Page Mag
Republicans failed to punish Obama’s national security abuses. Biden’s abuses will be worse.
In 2008, “dissent” went from being the “highest form of patriotism”, a quote by Communist revisionist historian Howard Zinn that Democrats falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson, to treason when George W. Bush made way for Barack H. Obama. The old bumper stickers about the patriotic value of dissent were swiftly replaced with others touting the value of change.
In 2020, resistance just as quickly turned into sedition once the political tables were turned.
In one month, questioning a presidential election went from a commonplace proposition to a shocking attack on our democracy. And we all know that if President Trump had been inaugurated for a second term, there would be no censorship or censure of the Democrat politicians and pundits claiming that he was only reelected because of Russia or UFOs.
Nor would we be hearing any talk of “sedition” and “insurrection” as if they were bad things.
When November was just decorating the flagstones of D.C. with faded leaves, the Democrat cliques inside federal agencies were still touting their skill at undermining the White House in chats with reporters at bars where drinks cost more than most Americans earn in a day.
These members of the “resistance” had spent four years undermining elected officials while falsely claiming that they were entitled to do it because the 2016 election had been illegitimate.
Government officials boasted anonymously of undermining President Trump, members of Congress and their staffers helped protesters get inside to disrupt hearings, rioters who assaulted police officers and attacked federal buildings were bailed out by Democrat officials and celebrities who enlisted Silicon Valley and major corporations to support the riots.
By the time November was done, resistance had been rebranded as “sedition”. Storming Capitol Hill went from a passionate endeavor by Democrat activists protesting the Kavanaugh nomination, the environment, or some other lefty cause, to the single worst event since 9/11.
Black Lives Matter riots had besieged the White House and set fire to its guardhouse, while still being defended by Democrats and the media as peaceful protesters. The media agonized over photos of federal agents protecting the Lincoln Memorial as a sign of incipient fascism. Less than a year later, 25,000 troops occupying D.C. like Baghdad are being cheered by the media.
The difference between resistance and sedition, between protests and insurrections, is who’s in charge. Democrats resist Republican elected officials. Republicans however commit sedition against Democrat elected officials. Democrats protest, Republicans riot. These aren’t distinctions in law. The only real distinction is who’s in power and who’s on the barricades.
Political hypocrisy isn’t a new phenomenon, but Democrats weaponizing the national security state to suppress the political opposition over the same behavior they engage in is a serious threat to the survival of the United States as anything other than a banana republic in a civil war.
The Democrats fired the first shot when the Obama administration used the national security system to target members of Congress during its time in office and then, in an election year, went after President Trump’s associates based on Hillary Clinton’s opposition research.
Instead of being held accountable for abusing national security to target their political opponents, Democrats, their media, and their allies in the system doubled down with fake investigations of the same worthless allegations that they never managed to substantiate.
After four years of falsely claiming that President Trump was a Russian agent and that the 2016 election had somehow been rigged with Facebook ads in an event that was worse than 9/11, the Democrats have pivoted to claiming that questioning the 2020 election is worse than 9/11.
Now the old abuse of the national security state under the guise of hunting down the evidence that Republicans had rigged the 2016 election has turned into abusing the national security state to punish Republicans for suggesting that the Democrats had rigged the 2020 election.
The only consistent thing here is the Democrat abuse of national security to target their political opponents while magically transforming election skepticism from the highest form of patriotism to sedition, and riots from a moral crusade into a major threat because they are now in power.
The failure to have any kind of reckoning with the Obama administration’s national security abuses has taken us to a new era of national security abuses by the Biden administration.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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