THE CORRUPTION OF THE MEDIA IN A POLARIZED POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

By Ken Grossberger, PhD

The media, both liberal and conservative, would have us believe every paranoid notion they foment, like Biden will sell us out to Iran and Trump will be a dictator. Believing this nonsense is the intellectual equivalent of going to a bar at 2AM and taking notes. Journalism, as we used to know it, was about providing information on the critical topics of the day. Now it’s an opinionated free-for-all with a can-you-top-this attitude in sensationalism where commentators cannot pile it on enough in a desperate attempt to bash the other side on a daily basis. They are down to name calling on a level that would embarrass the occupants of a junior high school locker room.

So CNN beats up Trump and Fox beats up Biden. Every day. All day. Each candidate is described in the most horrific, belligerent terms, and each is labeled a criminal and an existential threat to democracy, depending on the media outlet (oh yeah, and our guy is the savior). They would have us believe (whichever side they are on) that we certainly could not survive the election of the guy they don’t like. Yet we just survived a combined seven years of both.

Too many politicians, like many media types, cast ethics to the winds, and have no more respect for civility and honor than a storm has for the grains of sand on a beach. The negative lessons for the young may have lasting effects, as many continue to be lost in the dark hole of the internet/cellphone void. Yet, oddly, the percentage of voter turnout has been on the rise in recent elections. Below is a chart of the presidential elections since 2000:

US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION TURNOUT
2000-2022

YEAR	TURNOUT
2022	66.6%
2016	60.1%
2012	58.6%
2008	61.6%
2004	60.1%
2000	54.2%

ave.	60.2%

This represents an increase from the 1990s and 2000s when the average turnout was in the mid-fifty percent range. Perhaps voters are driven by party loyalty, anger, or fear but certainly not by respect for the political system. Below are the average approval ratings for the last 3 presidents in their third year in the White House:

Biden 40%

Trump 42%

Obama 44%

All three were disliked by more than half the country. All were in office during the attack-media period. Not that the media was all that kind in previous years, but it has gotten much worse.

It is routine to tune into one of the major media outlets and witness outright bashing of politicians and candidates, even making jokes about them in these “panel” discussions of so-called experts. They make up alternative realties to suit their tribal narratives, and facts don’t seem to be a concern. To add fuel to the neurotic fire social media is a sea of uninformed opinion, vindictive hyperbole and hysterical vitriol and it seems more like a therapy session on steroids than a marketplace of intelligent ideas.

So where does the voting public go from here? Perhaps the one critical issue that is not mentioned is the need for political education, so people know more about how government works and what the candidates really stand for. Maybe then voters can intellectually separate legitimate policy ideas from the hysteria.

POLITICAL POLEMICS PARTY

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

Only a schizophrenic could make sense of Tuesday’s House of Representatives hearing on Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report. The Judiciary Committee is loaded with Members of Congress who are also attorneys, and the hearing immediately devolved into a contest of can-you-top-this in argumentation and fact parsing.

Republicans and Democrats crafted statements designed to proffer a point view, irrespective pf anything Mr. Hur wrote in his report, or stated verbally. For example, a number of Democrats insisted that the Hurt report exonerated President Biden of any wrongdoing, irrespective of the number of times Mr. Hur categorically stated he did not exonerate the President. Similarly the Republicans only found evidence of guilt in the report. Wasn’t this the same document?

How can intelligent people come away with such dichotomously different interpretations of the same report? They can’t, unless of course its Congress and it’s an election year. Thus the problem. No matter what the issue, each side argues what they must to leverage advantage, facts notwithstanding. The more naïve portions of the public are bewildered, the more savvy listeners hear the same old song and dance. Left in the dust are honesty, honor, and a sense of justice. A poor showing after more than 200 years of democracy and trillions spent on a large, modern government. Yet this nonsense goes on and on.

Third party candidates such as RFK Jr. try to coalesce the middle in an attempt to cobble together a coalition of the reasonable, side stepping the noise in the DC swamp. To what end we will find out in November, but in the meantime it’s a fight to the finish over every scrap of information, every hearing, every special election, every bill and every issue.

We would need a legion of Diogenes-like warriors to wrangle the truth out of the political class in a desperate attempt to make sense of anything that is coming out of Washington.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN THE GREAT PARTY DIVIDE

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

Dean Philips has been told he should not run for the presidency because he takes votes from Biden. Same for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. No doubt the same for Cornel West and the Green Party candidate. The same will be “explained” to the No Labels candidate (if and when). Independents and moderates who state they will not vote for either Biden nor Trump are being told, alternatively, depending on whether they are getting advice from a Democrat or a Republican, that not voting for Biden is a vote for Trump, or not voting for Trump is a vote for Biden. The rationale for this voting strategy is that the other guy is so bad that he is an existential threat to democracy. But the real existential threat to democracy is the elimination of choice in a free society.

Free speech is infringed upon when people on either side of the great party divide think that what someone on the other side says is all lies, is dangerous and should be suppressed. Also, the Not-So-Mainstream Media edits and smothers content, as does social media, because what they don’t like is “dangerous.” None of this passes constitutional muster. Many Democrats suffer from a bad case of replacement racism and some Republicans wish to reconstruct the first amendment to mandate religion as part of government. Not good for democracy but policy has become the new religion and ideology has become theology. Let the sinners be damned and thrown to the scrap heap of democracy. But whatever happens, don’t let them vote.

This is party driven. Republicans and Democrats have fostered a dangerous age of polarization, and the fallout has covered the nation in an anti-democratic toxicity that is poisoning the ability of the electoral system to provide fair outcomes and reasonable office holders. The key variable is power, not useful policy, and certainly not good government.

The Discomfort of Undue Process

Ken Grossberger, PhD

What if George Santos is found not guilty? What if Donald Trump is? What if Hunter Biden is? What if Joe Biden gets indicted? The rush to judgment may satisfy emotionally, but due process gets trampled along the way.

Congress may have acted prematurely in the George Santos case. The press, and the people, may have prejudged Trump and anyone named Biden (depending on one’s predilections), in advance of any jury verdict. This is fine for a discussion at the bar at midnight, terrible for any appreciation of due process. The lesson here is that preemption may be prematurity. Expelling Santos from Congress and removing Trump from the ballot may be politically palatable to some but is also legally foundationless. The political strategies of ballot denial and power maintenance are also ethically dubious at best. The US Constitution requires due process to protect each individual’s rights, and even though in some venues due process does not apply in fact, it should apply in principle.

The most egregious example is in Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows unilaterally removed former President Trump from the primary ballot. Her argument was that Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection on January 6, thus she was compelled under section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the constitution to rule that Trump could not run for political office. Access to the ballot, therefore, is left to the constitutional interpretations of hundreds of unelected state administrative officials, a precedent under which democracy, as we know it, would disintegrate.

In Colorado the state supreme court also removed Trump from the ballot under the same logic. Here we have at least some semblance of jurisprudence, with a court of law involved. However, we also have the legal conundrum as to the intent of section 3 as Congress intended it in 1868. After the Civil War, Congress was left with the problem of over 5 million people who were still slaves in the south. Thus the legislature passed the 13^th amendment to free them, the 14^th amendment to provide them citizenship and the 15^th amendment to give former slaves the vote. The insurrection in question was half the country seceding and fighting a major war of separation from the federal government. Almost a million Americans lost their lives as hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides fought a desperate war in this rebellion. The superannuated but highly embarrassing January 6 frat party was incredibly wrong and damaging to the American psyche, but hardly an insurrection.

So, those who graduated from the Google School of Law, and some misguided courts, would have us believe that cherry-picking one’s way through the constitution to find a word or phrase that seemed to justify one’s preconceived conclusion is justified, due process notwithstanding. Removing Trump from the ballot, ipso fact, is supported by the 14^th amendment.

Thus we would be left whims of the perpetually upset never-Trump neurotics, or their counter-parts on the Right, to determine whom they would allow to run for office. Elections would become free-for-alls with competing jurisdictions summarily removing from the ballot candidates of the opposing parties only to suffer retaliation in turn, and then perhaps no one is left on any ballot. Court cases would pile up and the entire electoral system would be permanently constipated.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” as we hear so often, and maybe this year it actually is.

Shenna Bellows – What is She Running For?

Ken Grossberger, PhD

In this era of Trump ballot denial Maine Secretary of State Shena Bellows’ decision to eliminate Donald Trump from her state’s election is the latest example of trashing democracy in the name of democracy. She tortured the dots from the 14^th amendment to Trump in a self-aggrandizing attempt to convince the political world that she actually has a point. But in the end, she mangles the meaning of the US constitution and denies the voters any say in an election designed by law to provide such voting privileges.

This is that latest attempt by the left to reinterpret the 14^th amendment into something other than what was intended. At issue here is Section 3 which reads, in part, that no one who holds an office having sworn an oath to the “support the constitution……shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” constitution. The 14^th amendment was ratified in 1868 and was clearly designed by Congress to prevent former Confederate army veterans from holding office. Also at issue is the definition of insurrection and rebellion, which has nothing to do with Donald Trump on the infamous day of January 6, 2021. Even more ludicrous is that Trump was actually in office at the time, so the logic of the left is that Trump was conducting an insurrection against himself. The superannuated frat party of misfits that invaded the capitol that day deserve to be punished for breaking the law. They also severely embarrassed the country. Trump certainly could have done much more to stop the mob, and he did not. But this was not an armed rebellion, even though here are those on the left who are quick to point out that some of the capital transgressors had weapons. How does this one-day mess, as bad as it was, rise to the level of an insurrection on the level of the US Civil War where hundreds of thousands fought against the government and almost a million Americans died? Only in this age of extreme polarization can anyone this side of sanity suggest that January 6 was an attempt to overthrow the government that Donald Trump himself was the chief executive of.

But that was not Ms. Bellows primary motivation. She is currently the Secretary of State of Maine. She previously was a state senator. She also ran for the US Senate against Susan Collins and lost. So, stealing a play from Trump’s playbook, she makes a screwy decision to remove Trump from the ballot in Maine, not as the result of a deep-thinking process as to the legal issues at hand, but to deal herself into the big game, to grab the spotlight, to set herself up for the next office she may target.

Her political claim to fame is that she is a Biden sycophant, and now a lefty seeking higher ground. The two for one play is that she might actually believe she could keep Trump off the ballot at the same time, yet another paranoid Democrat seeking Trump inoculation. But if she actually succeeds, she would open something much worse than anything Pandora had in her bag of tricks. Consider the environment where administrative officers across the country decided who could, and who could not, have ballot access based on their perception of a criminal act. Also consider that usually most states have Republican governments. Game-set-match, the end of the Democratic party on most local levels in the US. Does future candidate Bellows really suggest we have a country where we replace legal guilt (determined by a jury) with some notion of administrative guilt determined by bureaucrats? Even though the left quickly points out that their now favorite clause of their now favorite amendment does not specifically state that a legal conviction is necessary, are they actually promulgating a government where the right to run for office hinges on the constitutional interpretations of unelected administrators?

Not quite what she may argue, but apparently, what she wants is controversy, and above all, attention. In a Trumpian way she seeks to command the notice of the media and make herself the center of the circus. But she is guilty of what Yuval Levin calls a “dereliction of responsibility” and the attempted “corruption of political culture.” By no means does this excuse the behavior of Donald Trump. He engages in what Mr. Levin labels “thuggish narcissism.” But this does not disqualify him from any ballot, and the US Supreme Court will undoubtedly make quick work of Ms. Bellows’ stunt, as well as the misguided attempt by other states to bury democracy in the darkness of gerrymandered jurisprudence.