Frank Miele: The “Big D” in the Democratic Party Is Denialism

By Frank Miele for RealClearPolitics

In my last column I lamented the inability of the Republican Party to win elections and to exercise power intelligently when they do.

The flip side of that is the Democratic Party, which has an uncanny ability to win elections even when they are 4 points down in the polls (see Kari Lake) and to exercise power with the raw naked ambition of a third world dictator.

Both those characteristics are only possible in a “small d” democracy when the people have been trained to accept the unacceptable and to reject the obvious. Call it ‘big D’ Denialism. A perfect example is the Democrats’ insistence that elections cannot be rigged, stolen, or tampered with.

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Anyone who challenges an election by pointing out irregularities is called an “election denier,” as if our hope for fair elections is a 100% guarantee of fair elections. This is absurd. Considering the stakes, and human nature, it is almost 100% certain that people are constantly thinking up ways to cheat their way to victory.

Yet the Democrats, and their media enablers, have turned reality on its head. They have convinced the majority of people that to question an election is a form of sedition. This obviously inhibits challenges and ultimately provides an impenetrable shield of safety for anyone who does attempt to pervert an election.

In a “small d” democracy, the problem isn’t “election deniers,” but rather “election fraud deniers.”

George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” But establishment Republicans have learned that speaking uncomfortable truths is no guarantee of being heard. What if the liberty to speak is drowned out by the tyranny of propaganda?

What if one segment of the political spectrum controls virtually all the bandwidth of the commercial media? Then the still small voice of truth will disappear into the background and be replaced by the loud insistent clanging of denialism.

To put it bluntly, Democrats have mastered the dark art of the big lie. They have self-righteously declared themselves to be the sole arbiters of truth, and they wield it as a weapon, even when they themselves are transparently lying. When President Biden and his Department of Homeland Security flunky assure the nation that the border is secure, for instance, there is not even a fig leaf covering their shortcomings.

They are nakedly, openly deceptive, yet somehow get away with it, perhaps because more than just elections are rigged in modern society.

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The recent proctological examination of the bowels of Twitter provides substantial evidence of just where Democrats’ heads have been shoved in recent years. Up in your business, to put it cleanly. And Twitter is just one component of a multi-pronged attack on your ability to think straight.

Edward Bernays, the famed impresario of modern spin, noted that “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Men like Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former “director of trust and safety” – an Orwellian title if ever there was one. As chief censor at Twitter, Roth was really the director of obedience and oppression.

It was his job to deny or diminish the voices of those who dared to oppose liberal orthodoxy. Like thousands of other influential people in Big Media, Big Tech, Big Pharma and the Deep State, he was simply a proxy for the Democratic Party.

And the Democrats, for their part, have become the party of denialism. They have so much control over the sources of information that they no longer even have to respond to complaints or accusations of impropriety. They just attribute the complaints to the partisan and conspiratorial thinking of their opponents and dismiss them as unworthy of discussion. Such denialism, along with the active support of a complicit media, has shielded Democrats from accountability.

Tony Fauci’s credibility? Hunter Biden laptop? Election fraud? “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

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Case in point? “Morning Joe” from last Monday. Joe, Mika and the panel all had a good belly laugh over the New York Post front page headline that declared that the Republican Party has “Eyes on the Spies.” The sub-headline said “GOP vows House roundup of 51 ‘Hunter’ hushers,” and the graphic featured mugshots of Obama administration intelligence apparatchiks John Brennan and James Clapper.

They were two of the 51 national security officers who – two weeks before the 2020 election – signed their names to a letter that suggested without evidence that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter provided a smokescreen behind which candidate Joe Biden was able to shamelessly dissemble, claiming that the laptop’s evidence of Biden-family influence peddling was somehow manufactured or lacked provenance, which is utterly absurd.

Didn’t matter. Biden lied because he could get away with it. The friendly media would have his back, and he knew it. The media was integral to the cover-up: The 51 intelligence officers said they based their suspicions in part on “media reports … that the FBI has now opened an investigation into Russian involvement in this case.”

Anyone want to take a bet that the source for those media reports was one or more of the 51 signatories? Talk about the snake swallowing its own tail! And now “Morning Joe” is running interference for the Gang of 51, mocking the idea that these security-clearance grifters should be held accountable for their disruption of the fair election process.

MSNBC panelist Mike Barnicle mockingly said Americans who are worried about paying for their home heating bill, their food bill, or the “status of their kids in school,” should forget about that because “we have to get to the bottom of the Hunter Biden story. We’ve gotta get Clapper and Brennan in and find out why they lied.”

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This is gaslighting of the worst sort. Since when did liberals assert that Congress can do only one thing at a time? It also implies that Republicans don’t care about inflation when the evidence of the past year suggests that it is Biden and the Democrats who don’t care. Republicans are also the only political party that has shown any interest in protecting children in schools – first from COVID lockdowns and forced vaccinations, and then from drag queens, boys in girls’ sports, and woke history lessons.

Most importantly, Barnicle implicitly admitted that Brennan and Clapper lied, but acts as though they had every right to do so. Mika Brzezinski then pulled out the pity card and lamented that the horrible Republicans are “going after Joe Biden’s remaining son,” as though the sad death of Beau Biden somehow gives Hunter a free pass to commit whatever crimes he wants to.

Even that is a red herring because the New York Post story isn’t about going after Hunter Biden; it’s about going after the 51 intelligence officials who falsely suggested that evidence of malfeasance in the Biden family was somehow invented by the Russians instead of turned over to a Mac computer repairman by Hunter Biden himself.

But hey, we are two years into the Biden administration, and more than three years since the FBI got ahold of the incriminating laptop, and still nothing has happened to suggest that Democrats have anything to fear when their president is exposed as a liar and a corrupt politician. So maybe “Morning Joe” and the rest of the Democrat defenders are right. Accountability is for chumps! Remember, it’s all the fault of those dirty Republicans, and when all else fails: Deny! Deny! Deny!

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His newest book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.

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