by ELLE PURNELL
Authoritarians, Hillary Clinton explained Wednesday, don’t “usually telegraph” what they’re going to do, but when they do, you should “take [them] at [their] word.”
She then proceeded to telegraph exactly what Democrats are doing, and plan to continue doing, to bring about — as she put it — “the end of our country as we know it.
Of course, in Wednesday’s appearance on “The View,” she accused Donald Trump — whom Clinton has clearly not forgiven for foiling her presidential aspirations — of being responsible for all those things. Trump, Clinton said, “means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values.”
Let’s unpack that accusation.
Throwing dissidents in jail: Trump, after winning the presidency, declined to have his Justice Department prosecute Mrs. Clinton, despite the massive evidence of her illegal activity and the Obama Justice Department’s decision to come down on her classified information scandal with all the righteous indignation of a butterfly.
On the other hand, as “The View’s” Joy Behar admitted, Trump has been “criminally charged with 91 counts,” roughly half of which have been brought by his doddering 2024 opponent’s Justice Department, with the other half brought by state and local prosecutors like New York Attorney General Letitia James, who literally campaigned on bringing Trump down.
A few moments before Clinton fretted about Trump “throw[ing] people in jail,” Behar proclaimed that “we should lock him up now,” to laughter and applause from her co-hosts and the studio audience.
Democrats have dragged Trump into court, gagged his First Amendment speech, made him stand for a mugshot, and sincerely aim to throw him in prison. His followers have likewise been subjected to political prosecutions, with grandmothers jailed for the same kind of behavior that leftist demonstrators routinely partake in with zero sanctions.
Shutting down the press: During Trump’s entire presidency, practically the entire corporate press worked rabidly to malign him. No less prominent outlets than The New York Times and The Washington Post were lauded with Pulitzers for their fallacious “reporting” about Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. Trump routinely gave the media access with twice as many personal press conferences per year on average as his hapless successor. Far being “shut down,” corporate outlets that hated Trump prolifically set a false narrative about him and were rewarded with reach by their allies in Big Tech.
The representatives of the press that have been shut down, however, are nearly all opponents of Democrats. Just this week, the House Weaponization Subcommittee dropped a bombshell report revealing subdivisions of the Department of Homeland Security and State Department pressured Big Tech platforms to throttle “true information, jokes and satire, and political opinions” posted by prominent conservatives including The Federalist’s own Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center funded a nongovernmental group that works “to blacklist and defund conservative news sites” such as The Federalist.
When the New York Post published a report incriminating Joe Biden in an international pay-for-play scheme weeks before the 2020 election, sourced to evidence gathered from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, current and former members of the intelligence agencies helped get the news outlet censored and suspended from Twitter, despite the FBI already having confirmed the laptop’s authenticity.
And we’re all aware of the censorship that targeted (and still targets) anyone questioning or reporting counter-narrative information about the Covid-19 panic, the 2020 election, and a host of other topics that are sensitive to Democrats.
Undermining the rule of law: Contrary to Democrats’ unhinged predictions, Donald Trump did not chain himself to the Resolute desk and refuse to leave the Oval Office, nor has he canceled any elections. He did not lead an armed uprising against the government on Jan. 6, 2021, but instead took to Twitter to plead with his supporters to keep their demonstrations peaceful before promptly having his account locked by leftist censors. To the extent that the rule of law is eroded in this country today, it is largely due to actions like Democrats’ partisan prosecutions of the 2024 front-runner and the bogus Russia-collusion hoax that they championed from 2016 throughout Trump’s entire presidency.
To say Mrs. Clinton bears responsibility for that is as much of an understatement as it is to say she’s unlikeable.