Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 20, 2023 4 tweets 8 min read Read on X
Trump can't be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection, says Colorado's Supreme Court. But he didn't. Jan 6 was a riot, not an insurrection. Behind the Democrats' turn against democracy is years of planning, including a secret effort to undermine the 2020 election. Image
Years Of Planning Behind Democrats’ Turn Against Democracy

War on Trump shows that the most dangerous people are often those who consider themselves incapable of evil

by @ZaidJilani & @galexybrane
Donna Brazile (left), John Podesta (center), and Rosa Brooks (right) led a 2020 scenario-planning exercise, the “Transition Integrity Project,” aimed at undermining the election.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald J. Trump cannot be on the 2024 primary ballot in the state. The Court found that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is therefore disqualified from running for president. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was originally intended to keep Confederate officials from holding office.

Yet Trump has never been criminally convicted of participating in an insurrection. Even special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Trump, chose not to indict Trump under the federal statute that criminalizes inciting an insurrection or rebellion, even though this charge was part of the referral from the January 6 committee. Smith could not build the legal case to include the charge, likely because of the First Amendment issues that would come with it.

The Colorado Supreme Court skirted both due process and First Amendment concerns and chose to equate Trump’s political speech with sedition in the American Civil War that killed over 600,000 people.

It’s true that Trump has at times adopted extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, including most recently saying that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

But one need not agree with anything Trump says to recognize that in a democratic society, voters still have a right to see him on the ballot. Over one million people voted for Trump in Colorado in 2020. What will those people think when they see that judges are essentially trying to take away their right to vote for the candidate of their choice? Will they really see themselves as included in our democracy, or will they continue to lose faith in the American political system? The answer is obvious.

Democrats’ argument that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy has little basis in reality. Trump’s election denial and machinations were not qualitatively different from the actions of many Democrats. As for the January 6 riot, it was largely the result of security failures, including leaders’ alleged refusal to call in the National Guard.

The court decision comes on the heels of years of panicked warning from Democrats and their allies that it’s Trump who seeks to end American democracy and establish a dictatorship.

In a lengthy essay for The Washington Post that quickly went viral last month, Robert Kagan argued that the United States is a “few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship” led by none other than Donald Trump.

The problem with this prediction is that we already know how Trump responds to all of these things: he was president between 2017 and 2021. When, for instance, the judiciary ruled against Trump – as it did many times during his presidency – he was more likely to send a Tweet than troops.

For instance, when a federal judge temporarily paused Trump’s travel ban targeting visitors from a range of countries in February 2017, Trump took to Twitter to lament, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned.”

At the time, Trump took heat for singling out a judge for condemnation. “The President’s attack on Judge James Robart, a Bush appointee who passed with 99 votes, shows a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the Constitution,” intoned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

But while Trump’s frequent verbal attacks on the judiciary may have been seen as impolitic by his critics, they ultimately didn’t amount to much — certainly not anything like an actual attack. Trump, throughout his presidency, ultimately preserved the separation of powers, and you could even argue that having an adversarial relationship between different branches of government and different parts of political society protects democracy rather than subverts it.

For instance, Kagan warns that “in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be ‘enemies of the state,’ the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”

But if the media’s lives were unpleasant thanks to Trump, it’s hard to detect that in their pocketbooks. Newspaper subscriptions soared under the first Trump presidency, and reporters who went out of their way to antagonize the president became instant celebrities with generous book deals.

Even when Trump did take a rare tangible step against press freedom, it didn’t amount to much. When the Trump White House temporarily suspended the press pass of a reporter who engaged in a lengthy verbal dispute with an administration staffer, the courts ruled that the reporter’s due process rights were violated. Whatever names Trump called the press, there is little evidence that he used his powers as president to suppress their critical coverage of his White House.

Meanwhile, his predecessor, Barack Obama, vigorously pursued whistleblowers with the full force of the federal government. As CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, the Obama administration “used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists . . . more than all previous administrations combined.”

One report from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard estimated that 80% of the media coverage during Trump’s first 100 days had a negative tone. That’s hardly a sign that the media was cowed by the presence of Trump in the White House, Tweets and all.

This adversarial relationship between the press and the president is good for democracy, not bad. When the media serve as handmaidens for those in power, we get less scrutiny of policies that we later come to regret – such as excessive COVID-19 policies like school shutdowns and the Iraq war.

One sign that the Republican Party would be moving in an autocratic direction would be if they stopped respecting electoral results and clung to power despite losing elections.

It is true that Trump refused to concede his own defeat, and his rhetoric helped contribute to political chaos around the election and the January 6th riot. Much of the Republican Party, too, has been reticent to admit that Trump lost that election.

But being sore losers about an election isn’t equivalent to being tyrants. Following the 2000 election, many Democrats, too, felt that Bush was unfairly made the president. Gallup polling from after that election found that “just 15% said he won fair and square.”

And, as noted above, some Democrats have similarly refused to admit defeat. While both Republicans and Democrats have a handful of gubernatorial candidates who refused to concede – Stacey Abrams in 2018 for the Democrats and Kari Lake for the Republicans in 2022 – for the most part, the parties have been proceeding as normal after defeat.

But Democrats and their allies were quick to predict that the 2022 election would produce a repeat of Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020. The Post surveyed a range of Republican candidates in battleground states about whether they’d respect the results of their election. When most of those candidates failed to respond to the paper’s questions, the Post ran the alarming headline: “Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results.”

Yet after the election came and went, every candidate except for Lake had accepted the results of their election. It turned out that it was less that the Republican Party had stopped accepting elections and more that they didn’t want to talk to the Post.

As NBC News wrote in an article shortly after the midterm election: “From Maine to Michigan, Senate to state legislature, Republican to Democrat, most high-profile candidates who fell short in the 2022 midterm elections are offering quick concessions and gracious congratulations to their opponents.”

That was a far cry from what was predicted by California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who warned in a Tweet in January 2022 that “every politician says this is the most important election of our lifetime. It may be. But it could also be the last one.”

During an appearance with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Swalwell expanded on what he meant in the Tweet. “I’m worried that if Republicans win in the midterm elections that voting as we know it in this country will be gone…if they are able to win the House, the damage they could do to permanently make it difficult to vote and to alter the way that we participate in the democratic process may be irreversible,” he said.

But Republicans did win control of the U.S. House in the 2022 election. And yet nobody thinks there won’t be another election – campaigns across the country are preparing to spend billions on it. Yet now we’re being told that maybe the next election will be the end of democracy as we know it. Why is that?Image
Please subscribe now to read the rest of this barn burner by @ZaidJilani and @galexybrane !

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Bonus for subscribers: why Niebuhr explains what Democrats are doing.

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More from @shellenberger

Apr 28
Renewables don't risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it's clear that too little "inertia" due to excess solar resulted in system collapse. Image
Six days ago, the media celebrated a significant milestone: Spain’s national grid operated entirely on renewable energy for the first time during a weekday.

At 12:35 pm today local time, the lights went out across Spain and Portugal, and parts of France. Although power was quickly restored in France, it could take a week to fully restore power in Spain and Portugal.
In an instant, the electric hum of modern life — trains, hospitals, airports, phones, traffic lights, cash registers — fell silent. Tens of millions of people instantly plunged into chaos, confusion, and darkness. People got stuck in elevators. Subways stopped between stations. Gas stations couldn’t pump fuel. Grocery stores couldn’t process payments. Air traffic controllers scrambled as systems failed and planes were diverted. In hospitals, backup generators sputtered on, but in many cases could not meet full demand.
It was one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. And it was not random. It was not an unforeseeable event. It was the exact failure that many of ushave been, repeatedly, warning lawmakers about for years — warnings that Europe’s political leaders systematically chose to ignore.

While Portugal’s grid operator REN initially blamed the mass blackout on “extreme temperature variations” and a “rare atmospheric phenomenon,” and while some media repeated that framing, the reality is more serious. Weather may have triggered the event, but it was not the cause of the system’s collapse.
Spain’s national grid operator, Red Eléctrica, revealed that the immediate cause of the blackout was a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that forced Spain’s grid to disconnect from the broader European system, leading to the collapse of the Iberian Peninsula’s power supply at 12:38 p.m.

“No one has ever attempted a black start on a grid that relies so heavily on renewables as Iberia,” noted @JKempEnergy . “The limited number of thermal generators will make it more challenging to re-establish momentum and frequency control.”

In a traditional power grid dominated by heavy spinning machines — coal plants, gas turbines, nuclear reactors — small disturbances, even from severe weather, are absorbed and smoothed out by the sheer physical inertia of the system. The heavy rotating mass of the generators acts like a shock absorber, resisting rapid changes in frequency and stabilizing the grid.
But in an electricity system dominated by solar panels, wind turbines, and inverters, there is almost no physical inertia. Solar panels produce no mechanical rotation. Most modern wind turbines are electronically decoupled from the grid and provide little stabilizing force. Inverter-based systems, which dominate modern renewable energy grids, are precise but delicate. They follow the frequency of the grid rather than resisting sudden changes....

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative reporting and to read the rest of the article!

x.com/shellenberger/…Image
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Louder for the people in the back: Weather may have triggered the event, but it was not and cannot be the cause of the system’s collapse.

If you are an electric grid operator blaming the weather for your blackout, you should be fired!

FULL STORY HERE

Read 7 tweets
Apr 8
Bravo to the Supreme Court for upholding the right of the accused under Alien Enemies Act to due process. "For all the rhetoric... today’s order & per curiam confirm... detainees... are entitled to... an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court..." Image
The Court adds, "Although judicial review under the AEA is limited, we have held that an individual subject to detention and removal under that statute is entitled to ‘judicial review’ ... as well as whether he or she 'is in fact an alien enemy fourteen years of age or older.'" Image
Kavanagh: "...all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question is where that judicial review should occur." Image
Read 9 tweets
Apr 7
Trump is losing support from Republican “financiers”, say the media. First, did it ever cross their mind that Wall Street may not represent the American interest? Of course not. Second, @FT irresponsibly omitted the small detail that Ken Langone’s @HomeDepot is long Vietnam. Image
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Perhaps the most entertaining part of the Trump tariffs is how they have brought together financiers and @BernieSanders , thus exposing just how full of baloney his whole “oligarchy” shtick is. Image
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@BernieSanders Why are we taxpayers funding this dishonest partisan garbage?

Not a single mainstream media outlet has acknowledged that Bernie is with the oligarchs. And that’s fine but don’t make pay to just repeat their propaganda. Image
Read 6 tweets
Apr 1
One FBI employee involved in the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop was Bradley Benavides (ctr-intel div). Weeks earlier he played key role in an apparent FBI scheme to smear @SenRonJohnson & @ChuckGrassley — who were investigating Hunter — as tools of Putin. Sinister.Image
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According to @SenRonJohnson & @ChuckGrassley , Benavides and a colleague on August 6, 2020 provided "an unnecessary briefing on behalf of the FBI and Intelligence Community on matters purportedly related to the senators’ investigation into Hunter Biden."

ronjohnson.senate.gov/2022/8/sens-jo…
Why would Benavides & FBI give an unnecessary briefing? Probably so they could then leak information about the briefing to The Washington Post.

Keep in mind this was 2.5 months before NY Post story.

This appears to be a key part of the FBI's disinformation operation.Image
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Read 17 tweets
Apr 1
The FBI said it didn't interfere in the 2020 election, but it did. It tricked Twitter & Facebook into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. Now, newly released chat messages show the FBI issued a "gag order" after an employee accidentally confirmed the laptop's authenticity. Image
This is a CatherineHerridgeReports @C__Herridge / Public Investigation

In 2024, an FBI official admitted to House investigators that an FBI employee had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Twitter on a conference call the morning of October 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published a story about it.

“I recall that when the question came up, an intelligence analyst assigned to the Criminal Investigative Division said something to the effect of, ‘Yes, the laptop is real’,” testified the then-Russia Unit Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in a closed door transcribed interview.

“I believe it was an (Office of General Counsel) attorney assigned to the (Foreign Influence Task Force) stepped in and said, ‘We will not comment further on this topic.’”

For the first time, and with a change of administration, the FBI has now turned over to GOP House investigators the internal chat messages that show Bureau leadership actively silenced its employees.

The FBI, which had a special task force to counter foreign election interference, could have set the record straight by confirming the laptop was real and the subject of an ongoing criminal probe. Instead, FBI leadership allowed the false narrative about the laptop to gain momentum.

The FBI provided the chat messages to congressional investigators with heavy redactions.

Some of the redactions on the chats are marked “OGC AGC,” which appears to mean that they were made by the FBI’s Office of General Counsel and Associate General Counsel.

An individual whose name is blacked out, tells Elvis M. Chan, the San Francisco-based FBI special agent tasked with interacting with social media companies, there was a “gag order” on discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In a separate exchange, Chan is told “official response no commen(t).”
In the chat, the FBI officials showed awareness that the laptop may have contained evidence of criminal activity.

Asked Chan, “actually what kind of case is the laptop thing? corruption? campaign financing?”

Another FBI employee responds, “CLOSE HOLD —” after which the response is redacted.

To which Chan responds, “oh crap” appearing to underscore the serious nature of the probe, which included felony tax charges. Chan adds, “ok. It ends here”.

In the same conversation, Chan is asked if “Anyone discussing that NYPost article on the Biden’s?” Chan responds, “yes we are. c d confirmed an active investigation. No further comment.” “C D” is likely shorthand for the FBI’s Criminal Division.

Said another FBI employee, whose name was redacted by the Bureau, “please do not discuss biden matter.”
We asked for a response from the bureau and the FBI employees identified in the chat messages. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

According to the IRS whistleblowers, DOJ prosecutors blocked standard investigative protocols that might have led to Joe Biden ahead of the presidential campaign.

“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election,” said Joseph Ziegler, the IRS case agent on the Hunter Biden probe.. “And it related to the president's son. So not even the candidate.”

The FBI chat is cryptic and the heavy redactions make it difficult to discern context. For example, an employee says to Chan that “[redacted] has a gag order from [redacted]... got checked by [redacted] had to backtrack - sorry!”
Another cryptic exchange came from Laura Dehmlow, the FBI employee who told House investigators that an FBI employee had accidentally confirmed that the laptop was real. “WTF(redacted) No COMMENT.”

An employee whose name is also withheld wrote, “nope, just a domestic hit job, yay” to which Dehmlow responded, “Yup.”

The exchange may be referring to the FBI’s knowledge that the laptop was authentic and not a foreign “hack and leak” or “Russian information operation,” as 51 former senior intelligence officials alleged at the time.

The IRS whistleblowers said there was no basis for the statement from the former intelligence officials....
Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting and to read the rest of this article!

x.com/shellenberger/…Image
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The Twitter Files revealed that the FBI ran a sophisticated info operation aimed at convincing journalists and social media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop, which it had possessed since 2019, was the result of a Russian "hack and leak" operation.

Read 5 tweets
Mar 31
The Right is a threat to democracy, the media says. But it isn’t. It’s winning elections and respecting constituitons. It’s the Left that is undermining democracy. It tried to jail Trump, is about to jail Bolsonaro, and just sentenced Le Pen to prison. This is a five alarm fire. Image
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And when the Left can’t incarcerate a presidential candidate, it simply prevents them from running, for no good reason, and in flagrant violation of the law, as the totalitarian creeps just did in Romania. Image
The reason the court convicted @MLP_officielis because she is 10 points ahead of her nearest rival in the presidential race. Image
Read 6 tweets

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