This week, Democrats elected Rep. Hakeen Jeffries (D-NY), an “election denier,” to succeed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as their caucus leader, and as House Minority Leader in the upcoming Congress.
Lost in the hype about Jeffries being the first “minority” minority leader was the fact that he was one of the leaders of an effort to deny the results of the 2016 presidential election through the “Russia collusion” hoax.
Not only did Jeffries falsely claim that Trump was illegitimate because of foreign interference, but he then claimed that the fraudulent “dossier” produced by Democrats through former British spy Christopher Steele, using dubious Russian sources, was not improper foreign interference because it was “opposition research” that the party had “purchased.”
He made that claim in 2020 as one of the House impeachment managers trying to convince the Senate to overturn the results of a democratic election and to have President Trump removed from office — in an election year, as the primary season for the next presidential election was already under way.
For all the talk about “defending democracy,” Democrats showed that they do not care about democracy when they elevated Jeffries to be their leader. They attack democracy when they lose, and defend it when they win.
Likewise in Israel, where the left-leaning press is tearing its collective hair out over the incoming government of Benjamin Netanyahu. David Horovitz, the editor of the Times of Israel, penned a column this week declaring that Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes members of far-right parties, is a threat to democracy because it may bring about what Horovitz called “untrammeled rule by a narrow, relatively homogeneous, hardline majority.”
But majority rule is what democracy is all about.
What Horovitz could and should have said was that Israel’s new governing majority is challenging the liberalism of the Israeli state. It is doing so in two ways: first, both Netanyahu and his coalition partners say that they want to rein in the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn legislation, which the activist judiciary has used to impose left-wing cultural views on the country. They also want to rein in the power of the police, who allegedly abused their power by hacking smartphones to intimidate witnesses into testifying against Netanyahu in his ongoing trial on flimsy charges of corruption.
Second, Netanyahu’s new coalition partners want to reverse some of the cultural liberalism of Israeli society. For example, one minister says he wants to cancel Jerusalem’s annual Gay Pride parade (though not the Tel Aviv parade, which takes place in a far more secular city).
Netanyahu says he opposes canceling the parade, which could provoke an outcry. Still, the issue is about liberalism (classical and cultural), not democracy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. media is cheering for a confrontation between the new Israeli government and the Biden administration. The fact that the new Israeli government was democratically elected is simply being ignored.
There is a reasonable debate to be had — and one that conservatives have traditionally invoked in defense of things like the filibuster — about the limits of democratic (small d) rule versus republican (small r) institutions.
That is not what the left is talking about, through its media and political outlets. To the left, “democracy” means that the left, and only the left, is allowed to win. Anything else is an attack on democracy and must be stopped.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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