In Brief: The Trump Indictment Criminalizes Political Dissent
Is it legal to disagree with Democrats? The January 6 indictment says it isn’t.
We covered the latest Trump indictment at length yesterday. Journalist Daniel Greenfield adds to that analysis with some critical points:
The serial indictments and investigations of former President Trump are meant to rig the 2024 presidential election, but the latest indictment is unique in rigging even its aftermath.
Previous indictments of the former president had broken all sorts of new legal ground by turning misdemeanors into felonies and deciding that the statute of limitations is just a suggestion, but the Jan 6 indictment by Democrat special counsel Jack Smith criminalizes election challenges.
Or at least election challenges against Democrats. And along with that, all political dissent.
The Jan 6 indictment contends that Trump’s election challenges were a crime. What does this latest indictment offer that the previous indictments did not? This one is designed to intimidate any Republicans who might seek to challenge the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Unsatisfied with indicting the leading GOP primary candidate in order to rig the election, Democrats are criminalizing political opposition before and after the upcoming election.
Greenfield argues that the indictment is a political screed from start to finish. He wonders why, if this is the standard, Al Gore wasn’t indicted, or why the Russian-collusion hoaxers are still free.
When Democrats spread lies about an election, they get book deals and evening slots on MSNBC, and sometimes, like Gore, they even get Oscars and Nobel peace prizes.
Challenging elections has been a traditional practice going back over two centuries to the 1800 presidential election. Free nations with open elections are not afraid of election challenges and the Democrats have spent a fortune on their own election challenge efforts. The Biden campaign spent $20 million on over sixty post-election lawsuits in 2020.
Nevertheless, Smith the “longtime Democrat crony” isn’t going to come out with indictments of any Democrat. Instead, he turned “18 U.S. Code § 371 into an open-ended tool for suppressing a wide range of political dissent.” Other parts of the law are likewise bastardized by Smith’s ridiculous twisting, which “will create an unprecedented suppression of the political opposition that will not end with Trump or with the 2024 presidential election.”
He then wonders about the Electoral College itself:
The Jan 6 indictment leans heavily on editorializing about the threat to democracy, accusing the former president of “destabilizing lies about election fraud” which “targeted a bedrock function of the federal government” while failing to actually establish why challenging federal functions ought to be a crime. If lobbying state legislators and searching for alternate electors is a crime then virtually every single president before 1900 would have been locked up. Not to mention aspiring political figures like Alexander Hamilton. And every time Democrats lose an election, they start plotting to eliminate the electoral college and have been seeking to do it through the back door using comprehensive measures like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Should the NPVIC and the states participating in it be treated as a criminal conspiracy against a “bedrock function of the federal government”? Jack Smith’s indictment has created a precedent.
After further argument, he eventually concludes with a broader picture:
Democrats have spent the last two generations criminalizing political dissent. Environmental activists demand that oil and gas companies face fraud charges because they “deny” global warming. Police departments face civil rights investigations when they challenge contentions of systemic racism. The Jan 6 indictment is part of a totalitarian program that rejects the idea of political dissent and the centrality of debate within the marketplace of ideas in our system.
This indictment is not just about a threat to a former president, but to the Bill of Rights.
If Jack Smith’s Jan 6 indictment succeeds, freedom dies and dissent becomes illegal. To disagree with leftists will no longer just lead to a loss of work or arguments on social media, but arrests, trials and prison sentences. What is at stake here is whether America will survive.
