Election Year 2024: We’re All in This Together

Last week in this space, I encouraged people on the right to be resolute and resolve to pray for our country, learn about its intellectual and spiritual wellsprings, work for change in it, and gather together with others in civic friendship. We are working to defeat powerful forces working against her and rebuild her institutions for the future. In light of some very destructive maneuvers just this week on the part of Democrats and leftist operatives, I’d like to add a fifth resolution. Heading into the elections this fall, we need to realize we’re all in this together and act accordingly.

We know this truth from Joe Biden’s inaugural campaign speech in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, this Friday, January 5. It was, as expected from Biden, a series of disconnected accusations fixated on the idea that the choice in the 2024 election was between “democracy” and “dictatorship.”

There were, of course, the fictions that always dot his speeches. No, he didn’t exercise his Walter Mitty-like autobiographical tendencies and claim to have graduated at the top of his class, walked with Mandela, or grown up in the [Puerto Rican, Jewish, whomever he’s talking to] community. But we did hear how he’s got to deal with “book banning,” a clear but dishonest reference to Florida and other states that have banned pornography from elementary school libraries.

And mostly we heard about Donald Trump, hoary tales about Trump’s alleged cynical language about American soldiers and sailors, but especially how he is a would-be dictator who “loves Putin” and organized the January 6, 2021, “insurrection” in which unarmed people supposedly nearly took down the government in order to reverse the 2020 election. To give credit where credit is due, Biden actually managed to deliver his story about how Trump masterminded it all without mangling it: “Well, so knowing how his mind works now, he had one, he had one act left. One desperate act available to him, the violence of January the sixth.” Other lines were mangled, as even the AP transcript laudably shows.

What’s worst is his lies about the American people, however. In trying to take down Trump, he is willing to attack Americans who were, in the main, peacefully protesting that day. Biden was lying when he said that “more than 1,200 people have been charged with assault in the Capitol. Nearly 900 of them have been convicted or pled guilty. Collectively to date, they have been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison.” In an article last March setting out basic facts about the prosecutions, Julie Kelly noted that only 100 people were charged with armed assault of a police officer, and none of the charges involve a firearm. 919 of the charges were for “trespassing.” Indeed, Kelly noted, “‘Parading’ in the Capitol, a class B misdemeanor, is by far the most common charge in the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation.”

An ABC News article this week updated the count of those charged to 1265, with 213 charged with felonies. But the article carefully refrained from saying what the others were charged with. “Parading” and even “trespassing” just don’t sound very scary, especially in light of all that footage showing Capitol Police opening doors for people to enter the Capitol building.

But it’s the threat that counts. While many of those J6 “paraders” still languish in jail, those who remember back before 2021 will recall that there has still been little reckoning for most of the BLM rioters who terrorized the country in 2020. Most of those arrested in the violent May 30, 2020, protests at the White House, in which dozens of Secret Service agents were injured, had their rioting charges dropped. And New York City this week agreed to pay $13 million to hundreds of protesters arrested during the 2020 George Floyd riots. While the settlement deal supposedly excluded those who were charged with arson or property destruction, the message is clear: get arrested for the right cause and you will be paid back.

As much as Joe Biden brags about justice, so too he brags about “democracy.” Yet it’s Democrats who are attempting to prevent those who may want to vote for Donald Trump this year from doing so. Invoking the 14^th Amendment’s prohibition on former “officers of the United States” who have “engaged in insurrection” from holding civil or military office as their justification, the states of Colorado and Maine have labeled him ineligible—even though he’s never been charged, much less convicted, of insurrection.

And it’s not just Donald Trump. Jonathan Turley reported in a column this week that while these attempts at eliminating the possibility of Donald Trump being on the ballot are being challenged in the courts, Democrats are trying to use the same maneuver to get any Republicans who challenged the 2020 elections off the ballots. Former congressional candidate Gene Stilp is challenging the eligibility of Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry. New Jersey Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell has sought to legislatively bar 126 members of Congress from running again, while “Similar legislation from Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres and ‘Squad’ members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.” As Turley notes, this is all extraordinarily hypocritical since Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin sought to block certification of the 2016 election, as did Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson and California Sen. Barbara Boxer.

The same goes for other aspects of the political sphere. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was hit with a $12,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission for raising “soft money” for a political action committee trying to reelect Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in Georgia’s 2020 elections. Justice served, right? And yet, on the last day of 2023, DOJ prosecutors were reported to have declined to subject infamous FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to a second trial, this time for his campaign finance and foreign bribery charges, citing “the public interest” in doing so. Given that Bankman-Fried was a major donor to the Democrats, with at least $5.2 million given to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, this looks like a move in the Democrats’ interest. Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett tweeted in response: “So we won’t know which politicians he bribed or who’s [sic] campaigns he influenced? That collective sigh of relief you are hearing is from the DEEP STATE.” 

Again, the message is clear. If you’re on the wrong side, you’ll have the book thrown at you for technicalities. If you’re on the Democrats’ side, you’ll be protected from wrongdoing directly related to their welfare.

All of which leads back to the resolution about knowing that all those identifying as conservative or on the right are ultimately in this together. In the political sphere, there is a great deal of hostility in public between those who support Donald Trump and those who support Ron DeSantis this time around. While some say the primaries are over already and Ron DeSantis has no chance, I’m not so sure that’s true. Many people support DeSantis for the nomination for a number of good reasons. But many support President Trump for very good reasons. What I care about is that whoever gets the nomination, we need to remember that we are facing political enemies on the left who do not want us subject to the same rules as they are. And they do not want, despite what they say, “democracy,” unless that means they win the elections and rule.

As the old Flemish proverb made famous by Ben Franklin during the Revolutionary War has it, “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately.”

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.