OpEd

Just as Donald Trump rises to his highest polling of the 2024 election cycle and as Biden’s approval is at an all-time low, a state court in Colorado filled with Democrat-appointed judges has ruled that Trump is ineligible to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot.

 

The ruling stands on the idea that DJT is guilty of being an insurrectionist, and is thereby unable to run for the presidency, citing the 14th amendment.

As we shall demonstrate, this decision’s legal reasoning is riddled with glaring flaws; however, its most egregious error can be discerned without a law degree: Trump has never been charged with, much less convicted of, the offense of insurrection, notwithstanding his indictment in four distinct jurisdictions.

It’s true that both DOJ special prosecutor Jack Smith and the Democratic Party prosecutor in Atlanta have indicted Trump on multiple felonies, and despite having the ability to do so, neither of them chose to file charges against Trump for participating in or even instigating an uprising.

Without the due process required to find someone guilty of a crime, these four state court judges have ruled that he is guilty of a crime for which he has never been charged and, as such, has never been afforded the opportunity to assert all of the constitutional protections that are afforded to those who are charged with a crime.

Is that indicative of a functioning democracy?

 

The True Meaning Behind the Mockingbird Slogan, ‘Danger to Our Democracy’

In the weeks preceding the recent controversial and highly partisan court ruling in Colorado, the mainstream media ramped up its usual assurances that Donald Trump is a tyrant, a crook and an insurrectionist who the Democrat establishment needs to eliminate at all costs in order to ‘protect our democracy.’

But is Donald Trump the real threat to Democracy?

Assigning culpability to an individual who has not even faced charges let alone been convicted of insurrection for the purpose of disqualifying them from running for president … is that really ‘protecting our democracy,’ or is it setting an extremely dangerous precedent?

It’s a rhetorical question, the obvious answer is that the deep political establishment is prepared to burn ‘our democracy’ to the ground if it means stopping Trump, and that’s exactly what they are doing.

In order to use the pretext that Donald Trump incited violence with his speech on January 6th, you would have to completely trample the precedents of both Brandenburg and Claiborne, two seminal first amendment cases of the latter half of the 20th century.

So I ask you, what’s the bigger ‘danger to our democracy’: an orange man who has yet to be charged with insurrection despite the claims leveled against him, or a deeply-embedded political establishment that will raze the constitution in order to maintain control of the executive branch?

If by chance you are unaware of what we mean by the term “mockingbird media” and the phrase “danger to our democracy,” I’d recommend watching the following video:

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the democracy in question is not ‘ours,’ it’s ‘theirs.’

Their endangered democracy is merely a veneer employed to obscure the relentless growth of socialist bourgeois statism and the velvet fascism that is skillfully infiltrating the culture and society.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential election is legally untenable, illogical, and a direct assault on the nation’s entire constitutional premise.

Regardless of whether or not one likes Donald Trump, this twisted form of lawfare undermines the fundamental right of the people to elect their own leader, and should deeply trouble every citizen in this country.

This undermines the concept of a governmental system consisting of three branches exercising equal authority. This was historically one of the primary reasons why, until yesterday, judges had virtually never entered election-related cases.

Indeed, the assertion that ‘Trump lost every challenge he presented in court regarding the 2020 election’ is accurate, as courts made every effort to prevent the hearing of those cases three years ago, including obstructing the proceedings on grounds of standing, scheduling, and, well, what else could they possibly do? Request a fresh vote?

The precedent established is disastrous.

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was correct when he tweeted that “The United States has lost its ability to lecture any other country about ‘democracy’.”

Why these Judges are Wrong

Earlier I mentioned that you would have to violate Brandenburg and Claiborne to criminalize Donald Trump’s January 6th speech by claiming, legally speaking, that it was anything other than free expression.

You might abhor Trump’s speech that day. One might argue that his words and actions regarding the postponement of the election result and the promotion of nonviolent protest marches to the Capitol were repellent. But regardless of one’s perspective, it is indisputable that Trumps words on January 6th fall squarely within the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, as the Supreme Court has primarily defined it in those two cases and subsequent precedents.

The following comes from an AP report back in August:

Donald Trump was indicted on felony charges Tuesday for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department acting to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy.

The indictment includes charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S., conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing an official proceeding and violating a post-Civil War Reconstruction Era civil rights statute that makes it a crime to conspire to violate rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution — in this case, the right to vote.

Now, some people might hear that and think, ‘Oh, that sounds like an insurrection to me,’ but it just isn’t.

Under the U.S. Criminal Code, there is a crime called ‘rebellion or insurrection’ that covers anybody who incites or engages in any insurrection or rebellion against the U.S. government. It’s in the U.S. Criminal Code 2383.

If Trump were actually convicted of this statute and he was found to have engaged in or incited insurrection, you could at least make a more valid argument that he is now ineligible to run under the 14th Amendment..

Trump has never been charged with inciting an insurrection. Never.

And if he had been charged, it would trigger a whole litany of constitutional safeguards and protections that Trump, like any other criminal defendant, would be entitled to claim, such as a jury before his peers, the right of cross-examination, the right of due process, the right to an attorney—all of those constitutional rights that attach to anyone accused of committing a crime.

Nonetheless, in a state court in blue Colorado, four out of the seven Democrat appointed Judges ruled that Trump is ineligible or disqualified from appearing on the Colorado ballot.

Here’s what the New York Times reported on the day of the ruling:

The decision, the first by a court to find that Donald Trump is ineligible to hold office again because he engaged in insurrection, is likely to put a monumental case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Colorado Supreme Court was the first in the nation to find that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment – which disqualifies people who engage in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it – applies to Mr. Trump, an argument that his opponents have been making around the country. The ruling directs the Colorado secretary of state to exclude Mr. Trump’s name from the state’s Republican primary ballot. It does not address the general election.

Ideally, the only people who have standing to bring this case in Colorado are Republican voters or independent voters—namely, people eligible to vote in the primary.

The unfortunate reality is that these cases are being spearheaded by a liberal advocacy group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or ‘CREW.’

And here is the president of CREW, Noah Bookbinder, who was very eager to take credit for this ruling:

I don’t know about you, but reading this almost makes me physically ill.

People like Noah Bookbinder have been getting high huffing their own farts for years now, believing that they are the sole guardians of American democracy—that the world itself is under existential threat from Donald Trump, and therefore, everything they do from censoring the Internet to trying to imprison the man, to putting his supporters in jail and keeping them in solitary confinement for months, to criminalizing the Trump movement by calling it an insurrectionary movement and now trying to remove him from the ballot so that a majority of American voters can’t vote for him is justified.

These people are infected by a cognitive disease, one that blinds them to any perspective but the one that allows them to keep playing the part of the hero in their own delusion.

Hilariously, this form of election interference is exactly what the Liberal orthodoxy’s public enemy #2, Vladimir Putin, was guilty of when he imprisoned Navalny. Even though Putin is by far more popular in Russia than Navalny, they say, ‘Oh, Russian democracy is a fraud. Putin imprisons his main opponent and doesn’t allow him to run.’

But I digress.

So, what did these Judges in Colorado get wrong?

First, the occurrences on January 6 did not constitute an attempted insurrection.

Although in some cases individuals acted perhaps excessively or foolishly, despite being the greatest gift ever bestowed upon the Deep State and Democrats, the events of January 6th did not amount to an uprising. Historically, when attempts are made to overthrow the government, firearms are typically involved.

On that note, the claim that insurrectionists are not eligible for federal service is patently false. A few years following the conclusion of the American Civil War, Confederate veterans—individuals who partook in an ACTUAL violent insurrection—commenced their service in Congress, and Confederate soldiers began enlisting in the United States Army. Indeed, it was not an issue that dozens of former Confederates, including high-ranking officers, went on to serve in the House and Senate.

Secondly, to say that Trump directly orchestrated the events that took place at the capitol that day is also untrue.

After his speech at the ellipse, most people went home. Conversely, one could posit that Nancy Pelosi is actually even more likely to have ‘caused’ the events of that day by flatly refusing to bolster Capitol security, thus enabling malicious actors to proliferate, or even that the FBI ‘caused’ it through its embedded intelligence operatives.

Third, I’ll reiterate that Donald Trump has yet to be found guilty of a crime.

Saying that ‘we all know it was an insurrection, and he did it, so we don’t need a trial’ is a slippery slope toward just being able to charge anyone at anytime with a crime regardless of whether or not they actually did anything.

And lastly, the title “Elector of President” rather than “President” appears in the clause. While these concepts may appear similar, they are in fact quite dissimilar. In the case of “officer,” the definition becomes even more ambiguous.

Those are the most glaring refutations I’ve seen regarding the ruling, and again, one need not be a law scholar to understand these simple concepts, yet the deep political establishment banks on the fact that you are lazy, uninformed, and accepting of their decrees.

The Usual Suspects are ‘Protecting our Democracy’

The current administration is propped up by a cadre of surrogate institutions like CREW and all the various organizations that make up the George Soros shadow network of NGOs, foundations, charities and advocacy groups.

CREW is yet another leftist legal advocacy group with “previous connections with political strategist David Brock,” who I spent a good deal of time on in a recent piece for Badlands titled A Cancer on Modern Journalism.

As per the immensely-useful website Influence Watch:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a legal advocacy group with previous connections with political strategist David Brock. The organization describes itself as a “nonpartisan” watchdog group directing litigation against government corruption in an effort to advance the public interest.

The group is part of Brock’s network of organizations including Democratic-aligned opposition research Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century (AB PAC) and media criticism organization Media Matters for America.

Naturally, CREW has received funding from left-of-center foundations, including philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and singer Barbra Streisand’s Streisand Foundation.

Over a decade ago, renowned Journalist Glen Greenwald spent time on the board of CREW, and, in 2010, he quit the board publicly because the head of this group had condemned Julian Assange.

In his words:

“It was supposed to be a group that defends transparency, that was its purpose, transparency and clean government and the president of the group came out and condemned Julian Assange after he had published secrets showing that the U.S. had committed war crimes under President Bush and then President Obama. And so, I quit in protest over their condemnation of WikiLeaks. I thought it was joining the board of a nonpartisan group that favored transparency.”

CREW is just one of many Liberal Advocacy groups who are leading this endeavor to remove Trump from ballots in over a dozen States, because obviously he is such a grave threat to ‘our Democracy.’

The words ‘our democracy,’ as we tend to see them in the context of current political events, appear rational at first glance, much like ‘our constitution’ or ‘our rights.’ These words invoke a sense of unity and inclusivity. Put simply, the use of ‘our’ to denote ‘everyone’ is intended to be positive, correct?

However, “our” in this case does not refer to all individuals but rather only to a subset of them—in this case, the ruling class.

The phrasing they are using is an intentional attempt to quell discussion and debate, rendering those who dissent ‘other’ and define anyone who does not subscribe to their statist, elitist, technocrat, oligarchical version of democracy as being a danger to the very idea of democracy itself.

This type of subtle, linguistic hypnotism is present in such things as the “Protecting our Democracy Act,” which sought to federalize elections and was pushed hard by progressive Democrats.

This kind of language is also on display with tech initiatives, like Microsoft’s “Democracy Forward.”

During a recent conference devoted to digital campaign security, an individual affiliated with the project known as Ethan Chumley employed a very revealing expression to describe the activities of Democracy Forward when he described what the movement does as “supporting the institutions we think (emphasis added) are fundamental to a healthy democracy.”

One “non-aligned” organization that receives funding from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other entities is ‘Defending Digital Campaigns.’

Its ostensible objective is to enhance the security of campaign data. Former Obama administration and current DHS officials comprise its board of directors, alongside former Romney and Hillary campaign managers Matt Rhoades and Robby Mook, respectively, and the chairman of DigiDems, an organization financially supported by the Democratic Party and, of course, the law firm Perkins Coie of “Russiagate” fame.

Democracy Forward also partnered with our good friends at NewsGuard, an organization that pretends to be a media fact-checker that awards outlets who pay lip service to establishment narratives, and slams those who do not.

Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, MSNBC, AOC, CNN, Liz Cheney, and an interminable number of others have parroted the phrase “protect our democracy”; in fact, some of them may be uttering those words at this very moment. But the kind of democracy they are referring to is a dishonest and rotted western oligarchy that, for the first time in recent history is poised to fall through peaceful, legal means, be it at the hands of patriots like Donald Trump or foreign powers like the BRICS nations—maybe even both.

The real threat to establishment control isn’t just Donald Trump; it is you, and I, and everyone else who reads and contributes to Badlands Media. We are the danger to their democracy, and we should wear that designation as a badge of honor.

What’s Next?

This ruling will almost certainly now be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s why they stayed the order until January 4 to give the court time to say whether it will rule on it or not.

This is especially so since the same liberal advocacy groups that spearheaded this case in Colorado have done the same in at least 14 other states where they’re trying to block the presidential frontrunner—meaning the person who more Americans say they want to be president next year—from even appearing on the ballot.

Yet again, what we have here are the very same people, in politics and media, who endlessly glorify themselves as the Sole Guardians of American Democracy, relying on classically anti-democratic weapons to try to cling to political power while deluding themselves that they are saving Democracy.

Beyond this ruling, Trump has been charged with felony counts in four other cases, the first one brought by a liberal prosecutor in Manhattan, the other state case brought by the Democratic Party machine prosecutor in Atlanta and then, the two federal cases brought by a special prosecutor under the auspices of the Biden Justice Department.

Regardless of one’s views on January 6 and Trump’s conduct concerning it, it is beyond dispute now that the primary tactic of the Democratic Party and their media allies for winning in 2024 is not to convince voters to vote for them, but instead to imprison their chief political opponent and to forcibly prevent American citizens from voting for him.

Whatever else this is, “saving democracy” most definitely has nothing to do with it.

Quite the contrary: on top of the ongoing attempts to impose increasing levels of constraints on the expression of political speech, it is genuinely hard to imagine a more glaring and more dangerous full frontal assault on democratic values than what American liberals in the Democratic Party are doing to prevent Trump from running, or even remaining free.