Democrat-Aligned Groups Increasingly Threaten To Undermine Democracy
'We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment.''We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment.'Mail-in voting is a humiliation ritual. But the Oregon governor's race has forced my hand.
I knew our mail-in ballots had been sent out because my friends were posting photos of their ballots on social media. This meant my mail-in ballot was probably waiting in my mailbox, as well.
But I didn’t retrieve it right away. I let it sit there. The truth is that I don’t like mail-in ballots. I don’t trust them. I experience a traumatic response just thinking about them.
In 2022, remembering what happened in 2020, I took my mail-in ballot directly from my mailbox to the dumpster.
Since mail-in voting was implemented in Oregon back in 1987, nothing good has happened here. The state has gone straight into the toilet.
And when it was implemented nationwide, in 2020, well, then the rest of the country went straight into the toilet, too.
So yeah, I can barely stand the sight of a mail-in ballot. I am physically repulsed. I prefer not to have it in my house.
Utopian fantasies
I didn’t always feel this way. I was happy to participate at first. In the early 1990s, this new way of voting seemed fresh, modern, and convenient.
The envelope shows up in your mailbox. You open the outer envelope and there’s another envelope inside, along with the official ballot, with its ovals and government scan codes.
You fill out the ovals, fold it up, seal it, and sign your name. And then cheerfully drop it in a mailbox.
Safe and secure
Mail-in ballots are designed to look official, sanctioned, secure. They make you feel like the state is being extra careful with your personal ballot, your one precious vote.
But the reality is that your ballot is just beginning its journey. It gets driven here and there. It gets put into piles and bags and maybe gets dumped in one spot and then moved to another spot.
It ends up at the post office, or in a county warehouse space, or it gets fed into a counting machine. It might even get hand-checked by an election worker somehow trained to decide whether your signature looks enough like the one on file.
Really, who knows where your one precious vote goes? After it is opened, depending on who sees it first, it might go straight into the trash!
A feeling of helplessness
In Oregon, mail-in voting is the only way you can vote. The future of your state, your city, your business, your family — it all depends on a complex system of mailing and sorting and counting and verifying.
And then maybe more ballots show up later. And the ballots of dead people are floating around. Or the ballots of people who used to live in your building.
And then activists “harvest” other people’s ballots. “Here, Grandma, let me help you fill that out.”
RELATED: California makes 'massive concession' in lawsuit over 20,000 'likely noncitizen' voters, DOJ says
The big night
After you have mailed in your ballot, a couple of weeks pass, and then election night rolls around. Often, one of the candidates will appear to have an insurmountable lead. The local news shows the tallies. The pollsters make predictions. Everybody gets excited. The projected winner might even dare to celebrate.
But after three decades of mail-in voting, we Oregonians know better. What matters is not who wins on election night. It is who wins in the weeks after, when those last bundles of wayward ballots finally make it in. Only then is the final count concluded.
In Oregon, the winner is always a Democrat. Maybe not for every minor local position. But if it’s important, the Democrat wins.
Since mail-in voting was first implemented in Oregon almost 30 years ago, all our governors have been Democrats.
And for the last 12 years, they have been exclusively LGBTQ, far-left, DEI Democrats. This, in a state once known for its balanced, centrist political climate.
Going national
In 2020, I used my mail-in ballot to vote for President Trump, who won handily on the night of the election, but then somehow lost by a late-arriving influx of mail-in ballots which — against all statistical probabilities — were almost all cast for his opponent.
In 2022, remembering what happened in 2020, I took my mail-in ballot directly from my mailbox to the dumpster.
This was partly out of disgust and partly because I had made an important discovery: While door-knocking for a local candidate, I was given an app that had remarkably specific information about the neighborhood I was canvassing. I could see which residents were Republicans, how often they voted, and whether any other voters lived in their house. Which meant that who you voted for was public knowledge, and not private and anonymous like you had been told.
But if there’s a chance ...
Fast-forward to now, and here I am, faced with another Oregon governor’s race. It is between two women, of course. But one of the women is a reasonable and straightforward Republican. And people say she has a real chance. So now I have to vote. Just in case it will make a difference.
So out to the mailbox I go. To retrieve my mail-in-ballot. I hold my nose. Fill in the ovals. And get it out of my house and into the mailbox as fast as possible.
Democracy's dirty little trick: You get the blame. The powerful get their way.
We the People.
Three of the most famous words in American history. They’re a source of pride for every red-blooded American patriot. Why? What exactly do those words symbolize?
What is the first thing people do when the president, or a senator, or a local mayor whom you voted for does something 'bad'? They blame you for voting for him.
Believing in “we” is believing that we are in charge of our own destiny. It means that an American citizen believes that he or she possesses ultimate sovereignty. That we make the rules. Not some king or a small cabal of powerful men pulling the strings.
That is the story we tell ourselves. It is the belief in the power of popular sovereignty or, in plainer terms, democracy. As a nation of individual sovereigns, we come together every few years and “make our voices heard” by casting ballots for representatives who we then demand represent our best interests.
This idea, I argue, is just one big myth.
Who decides?
Specifically, the myth is the belief that we, the people, have any meaningful say in how our government actually gets picked or what it actually does.
I sincerely ask anyone reading this to ask themselves: Who actually picks and runs our government?
Is it you? Are you getting weekly progress reports mail-delivered to you by the Trump administration? Or are you personally funding the campaign expenses for a 2028 Republican primary contender?
No. You’re not.
So the question is, what exactly is the mechanism that drives all the logistics, funding, and management of our political apparatus?
The short answer is capital (and capital interests). Capital is the engine behind democracy. It is what finds and bankrolls new political candidates, helps staff their administrations, and politically pressures them in the media. And when ordinary persuasion isn't enough, those with money and influence have other ways of getting what they want. Crazy concept, I know.
What makes someone else “more” equal than you in a democracy where everyone’s voice is supposed to count the same?
Capital. Money talks. Bulls**t walks.
A feature, not a bug
I can already picture the eyerolls and the groans.
“What an obvious statement! Just get the money out of politics!” —Disgruntled Reader
If your solution to our problems in government is “getting money out of politics” so that we can get back to voting even harder in the next election cycle, then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of democracy itself, which needs to be corrected at this very moment.
The mistake is in thinking our democracy is corrupt. It is not corrupt. Corruption implies a malfunction, a deviation from the design. There is no malfunction here. It is working as it is intended to work.
“But you have it all wrong! Our country isn’t even a democracy! It’s a republic!”
Yeah, that’s not the own that you think it is. Sure, our system is a representative democracy, a republic. But what do you think a republic is exactly? Who have our “representatives” historically been expected to “stand up” to? The big monopolies. Banks. Big Oil. Big Tech. That's not by accident.
Putting the customer first
And ask the obvious follow-up: Why does it always seem like our “representatives” fail to stand up to them? It’s because the real power doesn’t belong to the guy working a 9-to-5 standing in line at the polling station. The real power belongs to the class of people who bankroll the candidates on the ballot.
Think it through. If the candidate you’re voting for was brought to your attention in the first place by a big, mysteriously acquired pile of money, then who is the candidate actually working for? It’s not rocket science. It’s a simple 2+2 equation. It’s not that the republic is failing or that it’s corrupt. The republic is a machine that, whatever its stated ideals, gives people with money advantages that the rest of us can scarcely imagine.
Take a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, for example. Where would you say his power come from? Here’s a hint: It wasn’t from “making his voice heard” like every other schlub. He owned Little St. James, a private Caribbean island, and Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, where he reportedly entertained a bizarre scheme to impregnate multiple women with his own sperm. He had connections to powerful figures like Les Wexner and Bill Gates, and he maintained relationships in the highest reaches of business, politics, and academia even after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor.
Does any of that prove theories that Epstein controlled politicians through blackmail? No. But consider the extraordinary access he enjoyed. How many doors could a man like that open with a telephone call that would remain permanently shut to the average voter?
Ask yourself: Do you have access to these resources? No? Then how do you stand a chance of demanding accountability from your representatives when your only instruments are voting and protesting, while the instruments of capital include campaign contributions, lobbying, personal connections, and financial pressure?
RELATED: Why ‘Christian nationalists’ are liberals — whether they realize it or not
Hope without change
The point is this: What America promises its people is a lie. Republics, whatever their promises to the “little guy,” have always given enormous advantages to the “big guys.” The little guy gets a delusion of hope and a sense of control, while the wheels keep turning for the people with real influence.
And if this is true, then what exactly would be the point of your vote? Why do the big dogs put on such an elaborate song and dance just to get you out to the polling stations? Why do they need you to buy this trash they’re selling about voting harder and harder every election cycle?
Well, think about the psychological effect of casting a ballot. You feel like you have done your civic duty. You feel like this is the one corner of your life where you have some semblance of agency, where you are truly demonstrating the power of the people.
That feeling is the entire product. It is the exact feeling the capital class wants you to experience and internalize. Because ownership comes with something else attached: responsibility.
Scape-vote
“Responsibility?”
What’s the first thing people do when the president, or a senator, or a local mayor whom you voted for does something “bad”? They blame you for voting for him. What’s the first thing you do when a Democrat politician does something “bad”? You relish the opportunity to clown your liberal family, friends, or acquaintances.
“Those idiot liberals voted for this!”
Now, in reality, what does all this constant bickering, finger-pointing, and blame-shifting actually accomplish?
It takes the heat off the people who actually have and use their very real power to do the bad things. It shifts the blame from them and puts it all squarely on you. And that is because you, the voter, voluntarily take responsibility for it. Your belief in the central thesis of democracy — that you are the one with power — makes you take on the responsibility that comes with that perceived power.
Do you see the trick yet?
The elites are using you as a scapegoat. And I mean that in the oldest sense of the word. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid both hands on the head of a goat, confessed over it the sins of the people, and sent it out into the wilderness to carry those sins away. The community was cleansed. The goat was left to bear the burden.
That is what the idea we call “democracy” lets them do. They commit their sins, lay their hands on your head every November, and send you out into the wilderness to bear them. Democracy isn't the House of the People. It's Solomon's Temple. It’s the place where the priest unloads his sins onto the scapegoat and walks away cleansed while you carry the blame.
Slotkin’s lawfare warning will outlast Trump
Peace among political rivals often depends on deterrence. Each side understands that destroying its opponents today invites the same treatment when power changes hands tomorrow. That understanding is supposed to keep a republic from becoming an endless exercise in retaliation revenge. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) seems eager to test it.
At an October 13 appearance at the University of Chicago, Slotkin called for “signature cases” against people she believes enabled President Trump. She wanted graduates considering administration jobs to worry that they might be “buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want” and to avoid taking those jobs. “I want that deterrence message sent,” she said.
Democrats are not hiding the ball. They plan on bringing lawfare back with a vengeance. Americans should take them at their word.
Slotkin says she meant accountability for actual violations of law, not punishment for accepting a government job. Then why advertise scaring young people away from public service as a desired result? Holding criminals accountable is one thing. Making prospective employees fear the next election is another.
She says she wants to pursue the people who “enabled” Trump’s “corruption.” Who defines enabling? Who decides whether carrying out a lawful policy, drafting a legal argument, or simply working for the wrong president is corrupt? Slotkin and her fellow congressional HR ladies, apparently.
Political appointees serve an elected president and help carry out his agenda. That does not relieve them of responsibility for their own unlawful acts, obviously. But neither does it make every aide personally culpable for every decision made above him. A junior employee at the Department of Homeland Security might execute a lawful order without ever having devised the policy. Does that make him an enabler worthy of an investigation?
Perhaps he should have resigned, saluted Our Democracy™, and gone to work for the Bulwark instead. “I was just following orders” is no defense to a crime, of course. But “I worked for an administration you despise” is not evidence of one, either.
This is what is alarming about Slotkin’s language. She says accountability. I hear a political warning directed at people who have not yet taken a job, much less committed an offense. Once the process itself becomes the punishment, prosecutors do not need to win every case to discourage the next generation from entering government.
And where does this lead? A departing Republican president could feel compelled to issue sweeping pardons for his staffers before they leave office. That would be a grotesque transformation of a constitutional safeguard into a routine parting gift.
Even then, presidential pardons cover federal offenses, not state charges or civil litigation. They cannot immunize crimes that have not occurred. A president could never make the threat of politically motivated litigation disappear by signing enough papers.
RELATED:The raid that Democrats can’t wave away
Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) put the objection plainly: “I’m not aware of any Republican in office who has advocated the mirror-image approach — using the threat of prosecutions to deter people from serving in a Democratic administration.” His point deserves an answer. Is Slotkin trying to deter misconduct or Republican public service? Her own remarks invite the question.
Conservatives should not respond with a folksy, foolish “Schoolhouse Rock” pep talk about the glories of public service. Young people considering government jobs deserve to know that an incoming administration may examine their work. They also deserve confidence that investigators will pursue evidence of actual crimes, not guilt by association.
Democrats were serious about lawfare the first time around, and they will be again.
One-party rule has always been the goal. Young people need to be clear-eyed about what they are signing up for by working for Republicans, and voters need to understand the gravity of Democratic threats.
Democrats are not hiding the ball. They plan on bringing lawfare back with a vengeance. Americans should take them at their word.
Democracy may be dying. Conservatives can’t sit this one out.
U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told an audience at the University of Chicago that she wants future investigations of Trump administration officials to send a deterrent message. Young people considering jobs in a Republican administration, she said, should wonder whether joining it might buy them “a ton of problems.”
Slotkin describes her proposal as accountability for corruption. But listen to the threat embedded in her political strategy: Make public service under the wrong president so frightening that talented young conservatives never enter government. She said the quiet part out loud, and conservatives would be fools to ignore it.
If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes.
The peaceful transfer of power depends on losers believing they can survive defeat and return to fight another election. That assumption is eroding.
From the Bush-Gore recount to birtherism, Russiagate, and the battles over COVID-era voting rules, every disputed election has taught Americans to question the legitimacy of the next result. A political system cannot endure indefinitely when losing means permanent exclusion, financial ruin, or the threat of prosecution.
Eventually, the incentive to win at any cost overwhelms the willingness to accept defeat. The ballot is supposed to decide who holds office, not which faction gets to use the state to erase its rivals.
Donald Trump accelerated that deterioration because he inspires a peculiar derangement in his enemies. Progressives convinced themselves that Trump was a fascist dictator preparing a thousand-year Reich. They portrayed ordinary political disagreements as existential emergencies and justified extraordinary tactics as necessary resistance.
The campaign to stop Trump continued after he left office. His opponents pursued lawsuits, criminal cases, and ballot challenges designed to prevent his return. Conservatives watched the machinery of politics become an instrument for destroying the opposition. The law may permit a particular lawsuit or prosecution. That does not mean Americans should be comfortable watching every political contest turn into a criminal investigation.
Trump also survived two assassination attempts in 2024. The atmosphere of political hatred should disturb anyone who expects elections to settle disputes without bloodshed. Instead, much of the left treats Trump's second administration as an even more terrifying prospect because he has learned something from the first: Personnel determine whether a president can govern. The specter of Cheeto Hitler now excuses an endless war against anyone who might help him.
Trump entered Washington in 2017 without understanding how thoroughly permanent bureaucracies could frustrate his agenda. Officials who considered themselves guardians of the government against its elected leader resisted him from within. This time he has pursued loyal appointments and executive action aggressively.
RELATED:The global meritocracy myth sells Americans’ inheritance cheap
Progressives understand that a Republican administration staffed by people committed to its program is harder to neutralize than one staffed by its enemies. So the fight has shifted from Trump himself to the Americans willing to serve him.
That is what makes Slotkin's remarks so revealing. Young graduates already face a difficult choice between a prosperous private career and the headaches of federal service. Now imagine telling them that four years at the Department of Justice or Homeland Security could lead to crippling legal bills once Democrats regain power. You need not imprison every conservative official. Ruin a few careers, and the next generation will learn to stay away. An opposition that cannot recruit competent personnel cannot govern, however many elections it wins.
Trump's greatest failure may be his refusal to impose meaningful costs on those who abused power against his movement. Anthony Fauci is not in prison. Officials who conservatives believe weaponized investigations have escaped accountability. Radical activists continue to operate, while prosecutions of political violence remain uneven at best. In repeated games, cooperation survives only when defection carries a price. Tit for tat is not a pleasant rule, but one side cannot endlessly punish the other while expecting restraint in return. Without consequences, bad conduct becomes a winning strategy.
The danger reaches beyond staffing.
Researcher Jennica Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, has published recordings and documents she says reveal preparations for a constitutional crisis involving a network called the United Democracy Alliance. According to her account, former military, intelligence, and diplomatic figures have discussed scenarios in which contested elections, executive branch action against protests, and defiance by Democrat governors could trigger a challenge to federal authority.
DataRepublican interprets those preparations as the groundwork for a seizure of power. Her account describes proposed political red lines, including a federal response to mass protests, that could become triggers for a confrontation between governors and Washington.
RELATED: This is what existential politics looks like
One can chalk up the recordings as contingency planning, but the distinction grows thin when political operatives begin gaming out how governors might seize power amid a constitutional crisis. Elections are supposed to settle who governs. Planning to declare Washington illegitimate when an election or federal response goes the wrong way raises the stakes beyond ordinary opposition politics. Conservatives cannot afford to treat that possibility as an abstraction. They should examine the recordings, demand public answers, and prepare to defend their institutions.
No sane person should welcome domestic unrest. A country in which each election threatens imprisonment, confiscation, and violence would become unrecognizable. Americans have spent generations assuming that partisan combat ends when the ballots are counted. That bargain cannot survive if each party views the other as an enemy to be destroyed. Conservatives should demand lawful accountability for genuine wrongdoing, defend constitutional procedures, and refuse the comforting fantasy that decorum alone will restore the old rules.
None of this is permission to withdraw from politics. It is a reason to become harder to exclude. Vote. Recruit candidates. Build institutions. Win local offices. Know your sheriff, your neighbors, and the people responsible for keeping order. Cultivate lawyers, administrators, and young professionals willing to serve despite intimidation.
If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes. Democracy may not survive in the form Americans remember. The power conservatives build now will determine whether they have any say in what follows.
America’s ‘AI czar’ could revolutionize our form of government
Donald Trump is considering a small handful of candidates for “AI czar” — notionally, a Cabinet-level role overseeing the industry, the technology, and something the president is calling, perhaps in the spirit of Space Force, the “AI Force.”
Trump has not specified much beyond that. Nobody rumored to be under consideration seems especially eager for the job.
Perhaps we don’t need someone with the power of a czar to rule AI. Perhaps we need someone with the authority of a saint to counsel us about it.
Plenty of reasons suggest themselves.
Not quite everything is computer. Many crucial components of America’s good working order still require special and undivided attention of their own. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is no longer being considered because of the importance of his current role. The logic is arguably the same for White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios and other potential candidates.
And, as the untimely demise of Czar Nicholas II and his family at the hands of the communists reminds us, a czar invested with enough power and authority can swiftly become a scapegoat or blood sacrifice of the highest order.
Which brings us to the momentous possibilities unsealed simply by creating a high office called AI czar.
Polls show most Americans think democracy is doing poorly. For a growing share across the political spectrum, that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Two in three respondents say a democratically elected government is highly important to our national identity, a staggering drop from 80% just five years ago. Just shy of half of Americans under 30 say democracy is either not that important to our national identity or not important at all.
Many Americans, of course, remain firmly committed to democracy. That includes plenty who regard it, in Churchill’s famous formulation, as the worst form of government except for all the others.
Abandoning it would also appear to require scrapping the Constitution and repudiating the Declaration of Independence.
However far we have strayed in 250 years from those founding documents, the right to vote and the core freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights still command strong majority support. Plenty of younger Americans are open to rewriting the Constitution, but a national convention for that purpose remains broadly unpopular.
RELATED: ‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive
Then comes the practical problem: Americans cannot remotely agree on who ought to rule them, much less what a formally post-democratic America should look like.
Many people ready to walk away from democracy, or convinced that it is unsalvageable, stop short of demanding regime change when they contemplate the obvious alternative: another, still more horrible civil war.
Now add AI.
Its arrival and incorporation into the highest levels of government under a czar of its own throw our fundamental regime questions into unusually sharp relief.
Many Americans feel viscerally that AI is moving too fast. Many also regard the staggering decline and decay of the past decade-plus as an unacceptable alternative to moving fast.
Yet the people trying to pump the brakes or reverse course command nothing like a popular majority.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have proposed banning artificial superintelligence, pausing some advanced AI development until a new federal regulator writes safety rules, and imposing penalties of up to 20 years in prison for certain violations.
Whatever one thinks of the underlying risks, that approach is likely to feed a post-democratic counterreaction against efforts to place technological development under increasingly centralized political control.
Meanwhile, much of the AI-safety world gives normal Americans the ick for reasons of its own: the prevalence of nerd-orgy ethics, for one, and the baffling insistence in some quarters that rational thought requires assigning the existence of future shrimp, bugs, or cyborgs moral weight comparable to — or greater than — your own life and the lives of everyone now drawing breath.
For reasons like these, some on the right daydream about an actual Caesar who could, as a last resort, clean America’s house and put it back into fighting trim.
Others imagine something less deliberate: The system collapses under the weight of its dysfunction, a process of elimination begins, and a Caesar-ish figure emerges from the gong show to take control at a stroke.
That “-ish” is important.
RELATED: Now they’re saying the AIs built ‘secret civilizations’ — the truth is far worse
Our circumstances and our talent pool differ so radically from those of the late Roman Republic that betting everything on the miraculous appearance of a Julius or Augustus seems far-fetched.
Even grown in a lab, Czarborg would be only a simulation of the genuine article — more Frankenstein than Constantine.
Speaking of Constantine, the record of Roman caesars, Russian czars, and German kaisers should cure anyone of the idea that concentrated power reliably produces competent or benevolent rule. Plenty of mighty rulers did far more damage to their countries and their people than good.
But Constantine, like Nicholas II, also points toward another category entirely: Caesars and czars can become saints.
Some will object that sainthood is itself a dubious title, especially when bestowed on rulers.
The more interesting difficulty is that genuinely saintly rulers, like genuinely saintly people, are not measured by their ability to deliver merely mortal justice or merely worldly happiness.
Divine justice and divine happiness are different things. Christ’s reception and punishment in Jerusalem should permanently unsettle anyone looking to godly leaders for uncomplicated worldly deliverance.
Which leaves us with the most counterintuitive possibility raised by something as powerful as AI.
Perhaps we do not need someone with the power of a czar to rule it. Perhaps we need someone with the authority of a saint to counsel us about it.
The party of democracy keeps editing the results
Democrats increasingly treat their voters’ choices as provisional because party activists and much of the political press allow it. From Joe Biden’s replacement in 2024 to current attacks on Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.), the party establishment respects election results only until those results become inconvenient. That habit damages the party’s credibility on election integrity and may eventually damage the establishment itself.
Two years ago, Democrats already had their presidential nominee. Joe Biden had won every Democratic presidential contest except American Samoa and faced no serious challenge (unlike Jimmy Carter in 1980). He had also won the 2020 nomination and occupied the White House.
Democratic leaders keep courting the left’s energy while blocking some of its candidates from power. That arrangement cannot last forever.
After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, however, Democrat officials and donors spent weeks demanding that he withdraw. Their pressure campaign set aside months of primaries in which roughly 14 million Democrats had supported him. No presumptive major-party nominee in the modern primary era had withdrawn so late.
Democrats did use a formal replacement process. Biden’s withdrawal unbound nearly all of his delegates, Harris qualified for the ballot, and during a virtual roll-call vote, 99% of participating delegates voted for her. But primary voters never chose Harris for president in 2024, and party leaders never held an open convention in which competing candidates could make their case. By the convention, Harris and Tim Walz were already the ticket.
That was the first do-over: Primary voters chose Biden, and delegates later chose Harris after party leaders drove Biden from the race.
Maine supplied a clearer example this year. Voters nominated Graham Platner for Senate with more than 156,000 votes. After a woman accused Platner of rape — an allegation he denied — he withdrew on the last day Maine law allowed Democrats to replace him on the ballot.
Party delegates then selected Troy Jackson, who had not competed in the Senate primary and had finished third in the gubernatorial primary, by a 566-5 vote. The party followed Maine law, but primary voters had no say in their replacement nominee.
Wisconsin shows another kind of intervention. After the establishment favorite left the governor’s race amid campaign-finance trouble, David Crowley re-entered with Gov. Tony Evers’ backing and narrowly defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong. Voters made the final choice, so Wisconsin was no do-over. It does show how quickly party leaders mobilize when the left threatens to capture a nomination.
Pennsylvania now shows another variation of the fix. Democrats nominated Fetterman for Senate in 2022 and stood by him after a serious stroke.
They called Fetterman a fighter and a maverick, just what the Senate needed. When he won, Senate Democrats rallied around him and even loosened the dress code for him. Then he broke with progressives over Israel, arguing that it had a right to defend itself after Hamas’ terrorist attack.
A recent Wall Street Journal report said Fetterman had neglected many Senate duties, citing accounts from former staffers. Some Democrat lawmakers and activists immediately attacked him; one Democratic National Committee vice chairman said “2028 can’t come soon enough.” Depart from party orthodoxy, and you’re through.
RELATED: AOC made socialism cool. Now the socialists want her gone.
This pattern succeeds because party voters rarely punish it and much of the political press treats each episode as an isolated event. Voters whose choices party leaders set aside receive little sustained attention. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Repeatedly overriding primary outcomes also weakens Democrats’ claims to defend election integrity. If they don’t care about their own members’ votes, they don’t care about yours. No wonder they oppose election oversight when they want to overlook their own primaries.
The establishment’s short-term victories may carry long-term costs. In 2016, DNC officials favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Yet Sanders and his faction now exert more influence over the party than Clinton does.
The Democratic left has grown stronger even as establishment figures try to contain it. Each intervention deepens resentment among activists who believe party leaders accept their votes only when they approve the result.
Democrat leaders keep courting the left’s energy while blocking some of its candidates from power. That arrangement cannot last forever.
Eventually, procedural trickery will no longer protect the Democrat establishment from the faction it has encouraged but repeatedly tried to keep off the ballot.
Democrats’ Maine mess puts insiders back in charge
"Inclusive.” “Representative.” “Transparent.” That is how Maine Democratic Party Chairman Charlie Dingman describes the process for selecting a new Democratic nominee after Graham Platner’s withdrawal last week from the U.S. Senate race.
Those are worthy goals. But can a process truly be fair, representative, and transparent when the voters who participated in the June primary will not directly choose the replacement nominee?
Maine voters deserve to know that their vote counts not only on Election Day, but throughout the electoral process.
Under Maine law, Democrats have until July 27 to select a replacement. Rather than hold another statewide primary, party officials will convene a nominating convention to choose the candidate who appears on the November ballot.
That means 601 delegates from Maine’s 16 counties — not the full primary electorate that selected Platner — will choose the replacement nominee.
Primary elections and nominating conventions serve different purposes. A primary gives every eligible voter an equal voice in choosing a nominee. A convention limits that decision to party delegates acting on behalf of the organization.
Both are recognized under Maine law. But they are fundamentally different processes, and the distinction is vital.
The question is not whether Maine Democrats are acting within the law. The question is whether replacing the primary electorate with a convention best preserves public confidence.
Transparency is important. But transparency alone does not answer the deeper question: Should voters or party delegates choose a replacement nominee after a primary?
The circumstances in Maine are unusual, but the broader issue is not.
Political parties across the country have rules for replacing nominees when unexpected vacancies occur. A replacement is necessary. Parties must follow the law. But they should also ask whether their procedures reflect the will of voters as closely as circumstances allow.
RELATED: The media’s Democratic cover-up is collapsing
Following the law is essential. Preserving confidence in the process is essential too.
This is not the first time Democratic voters have watched party leaders make consequential decisions after ballots had already been cast. In 2024, Democratic delegates, rather than primary voters, selected Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden stepped aside.
Regardless of where one stood on that decision, it raised an enduring question now facing Maine: When circumstances change after a primary, who should choose the replacement nominee?
Election integrity is often discussed in terms of voter ID, ballot security, voter rolls, and timely vote counting. Those safeguards matter because they help ensure elections are conducted securely and accurately.
But election integrity also depends on voters believing their participation shapes the outcome.
When the final decision shifts from the primary electorate to party delegates after voters have already cast ballots, voters are left wondering how much their vote truly counts.
That uncertainty fuels something increasingly common in American politics: cynicism.
A growing number of Americans have adopted a “black-pill” view of politics — the belief that participation is pointless because vital decisions are ultimately made by a small group rather than the broader electorate.
They’re wrong. Voting remains viable.
Yet every time a party shifts a consequential decision from the full primary electorate to a smaller group of delegates after ballots have already been cast, it becomes harder to convince people their participation makes a difference.
RELATED: This is not the ‘red wave’ America needs
Maine voters deserve to know that their vote counts not only on Election Day, but throughout the electoral process.
Election integrity is about more than secure ballots and accurate voter rolls. It is about preserving public confidence that voters, not party insiders, ultimately decide who represents them.
Maine’s experience should prompt lawmakers and political parties to examine whether existing nominee replacement procedures preserve voter confidence when nominees withdraw after a primary.
The question in Maine is not simply who the next Democratic nominee will be.
It is whether voters remain at the center of the process after their ballots have been cast.
The strength of an election is measured not only by how votes are counted, but by whether the voters who cast them still have the final word.
Jefferson’s line of revolutionary fire still burns
Thomas Jefferson wrote many letters to John Adams about government, liberty, and England’s corruption under King George III. Jefferson once put his disgust plainly: “It has been a strong reason with me for wishing there was an ocean of fire between that island and us.”
Earlier in their political careers, Adams had chosen Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson then penned a sentence that became the greatest line of revolutionary fire ever written, separating freedom from tyranny as clearly as any ocean of fire could.
With one line, the tyranny present throughout human history was turned upside down. Humanity knew real liberty in a new and enduring way.
During the classical era, pharaohs claimed godhood and treated their people as lesser beings, fit only for slavery and submission. Godhood placed the pharaoh and his ministers above the humanity beneath them.
But in the land of Goshen lived the tribes of Israel. Freed by Moses, they came to camp in the shadow of Mount Sinai, where they received the Ten Commandments — the law of God on earth, demanding obedience from kings, priests, and commoners alike.
Centuries later, democracies emerged along the Hellenic coasts of Greece, while the Roman Republic arose on the Italian peninsula. These societies were imperfect but freer than the empires around them.
In Greece, that freedom lasted until Philip II of Macedon devoured the city-states and left an empire to his son Alexander. After conquering Egypt, Alexander demanded to be known as the “son of Amon,” claiming the aura of godhood and exerting a tyranny like that of the pharaohs.
In Rome, the republic endured for nearly 500 years before falling to imperial rule. The Julio-Claudian line eventually produced Caligula, who demanded to be adored as a god in the Temple of Solomon itself. Thus came the tyranny of the Caesars.
In medieval Europe, kings could not claim to be gods. But they could claim to be anointed by God, placing their crowns above ordinary men as surely as the stars appear above the sea.
King John of England ruled through vis et voluntas — force and will. The rapacity of his will and the weakness of his rule led to Magna Carta in 1215, the first great liberating document written in Europe since the Roman Republic.
A descendant of King John, Henry VIII, placed in his own person the powers of king and head of the church. He claimed to rule by divine right. The kings who followed asserted the same claim: that all beneath the sun was beneath them by God’s will.
So it is that the history of humanity is, in large part, the history of tyranny.
Then a descendant of that line, George III, inspired Jefferson’s line of revolutionary fire: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
That sentence means all of us possess the same rights, and no one has a superior right to take them away — no pharaoh, emperor, conqueror, king, queen, or dictator.
RELATED: America’s birth defect did not define our destiny
If our rights are given to us equally by God, then none may rule over us by claiming we are unequal. Among those rights are faith, speech, assembly, and the right to remove from power those who misgovern us.
Thus, our government is our servant — never our master.
By that one line, the tyranny present throughout human history was turned upside down. Humanity knew real liberty in a new and enduring way.
The foremost lesson of history is that tyranny is always with us.
In recent history, the murderous Bolsheviks toppled the 300-year empire of the czars, looted and burned churches, and murdered priests. They knew God would never be a socialist Bolshevik, so they placed themselves above God.
When Hitler came to power, he sought to eradicate the Jewish people, murdering 6 million Jews. He knew that neither the Jews nor God would join the socialist Nazi Party, so he placed himself above God.
In China, Mao Zedong drove the moral center out of his nation through a murderous purge, killing tens of millions of his own people in the name of revolution. Confucius had no place in Mao’s socialist order, so Mao placed himself above God.
Such is tyranny in our own time.
In America today, democratic socialists attack the faith of our Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens. They seek the removal of the Ten Commandments from schools and public squares. They attack Christianity and Western civilization. They insist that our nation under God is evil and must be remade.
It is socialism in America that must be defeated.
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the greatest sentence ever written in the history of freedom, let us hold fast to God, the creator and guarantor of our rights.
Let us hold fast to that line of revolutionary fire with a will of steel — for the sake of all our liberties.
Democrats Have Completely Normalized Their Threats To Democracy
Republicans, take note: While it’s supposedly a major party foul to question the results of an election (at least when Republicans do it), it’s apparently just fine to undo the results when they don’t go your way. That should be really useful information going forward. A couple of prominent Democrats made those rules very clear […]Today's top stories
www.theblaze.com
thefederalist.com
www.theblaze.com