Are we Witnessing the Breakdown of American Democracy? #408

From us at Drishtikone, we wish all of you and yours at home a very joyous Diwali! May Maa Lakshmi and Ganesha bless you always. May the consciousness of Shri Ram always be with you.

The Opening

On November 8th, a group of five Republicans - Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tim Scott; stood on the stage for 3rd primary debate.

The beginning of the debate unleashed a moment, that I believe will serve as the biggest game-changer within American Democracy or whatever is left of it.

Vivek openly called the Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, for her disastrous record at the head of the party. And then even offered to yield his time to her if she wanted to come on the stage and resign.

After that, he called out the obvious about how the debate that day was being conducted. By NBC. The far-left media outlet. What should have raised eyebrows of every republican voter, did not even seem odd to the honchos in that party.

Once he had called that out, he went on to point to the false reporting by NBC regarding the Russian-Trump collusion story.

Ronna McDaniel did not take Vivek's call nicely. She went ahead to trash him and say that he was not going to get "one cent" of funding. As if it was her money!

After that, Republicans have been coming out trying to trash Ramaswamy in their own way.

So this is the Republican "establishment" that Vivek called out and is after.

Here is the kicker - after the 3rd debate Vivek is already hitting #3 in the overall ranking on the betting sites.

Entrepreneur and right-wing political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, meanwhile, was generally lauded by pundits after last night’s debate for managing to distinguish himself in a field of better-known politicians. Polymarket bettors – in line with prediction markets on average – place Ramaswamy cleanly ahead of the Florida governor in the race for the GOP nomination. Over the past week, bets in favor of Ramaswamy have increased in price from 13 cents to 16 cents. (Source: After GOP Debate, Blockchain Bettors See Ramaswamy as Most Formidable Trump Challenger/ Yahoo)

The bump in his ratings matches the reactions on Twitter to his performance. The "base" as they say is firmly behind Vivek.

Do you see the dichotomy?

The Republican Party is broken! Badly! And perhaps irretrievably.

In fact, for the most part, the Republican establishment is now tied to the hip with the overall "deep state" establishment that Vivek talks about and that we have been writing about for so many days.

This won't be the first time. There is a template.

The first Hindu Presidential candidate - Tulsi Gabbard was a nominee in the Democratic party.

That was the last time that an anti-establishment candidate came to the stage. She had virtually destroyed Kamala Harris' battle with just a meager 2 minutes of time she was allotted. The current VP came down from a 20+% approval rating to around 2% in just a few weeks.

And, then they changed the rules on Tulsi at the last moment for the other debates.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — the last remaining woman in the Democrats’ presidential race — has been shut out of the party’s next debate with a rule change that makes it mathematically impossible for her to claim a podium. “To keep me off the stage, the DNC again arbitrarily changed the debate qualifications,” Gabbard tweeted late Friday. “Previously they changed the qualifications in the OPPOSITE direction so Bloomberg could debate.” She implored the two front-runners, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, to intervene on her behalf. (Source: Tulsi Gabbard, last female in Democratic race, booted from next debate / New York Post)

Her former rival, Andrew Yang put it in the best possible way.

While they cannot change the rules on Vivek to keep him out because he has checked every box. But they will come out with something to keep him from coming on that stage again.

The dichotomy that is breaking the American nation through into two halves is also breaking the Republican party.

For a republic (rule by the people) to work, the rulers should be aligned with the public or one day the "Bastille could be stormed".

Why are we saying that this will be the most defining moment for American Democracy?

Because it will be very tough to put the American democracy back again.

What happened on November 8th cannot be unheard now. Nor will its consequences be turned back.

Elections are Rigged, Contested, and Untrustworthy while Questions are Censured

Let us fully understand the context now.

We will start with what we consider to be the most fundamental issue with the American Democracy and Republic polity - inherent distrust of the individual voter.

Voter Vs the College

There was a time when an election was decided by the Supreme Court where the votes had to be recounted.

This one picture tells the entire story of that election and what is fundamentally wrong with American Democracy.

Al Gore had won the popular vote by 543,895 votes. But he lost the election. Because the "Electoral College" voted otherwise.

How was this possible? What is the "Electoral College"?

The National Archives site defines it as below.

Let us see it in this short but informative video from TED which explains the situation between Al Gore and George Bush.

Do you see the issue here?

Is that even democracy at all?

As this article on the Cambridge Press site details - the Electoral College is designed from the ground up to have a President who is totally blind to the needs of the smaller states. 39 of them as we know it!

When the Head of the State does not give a rat's arse about 78% of the country, then is it really a Republic anymore?

Rigging of Elections

In 2020 One Fulton County warehouse in Georgia housed over 140,000 absentee ballots. One night the lock to its 100-pound door was opened and breached.

Just watch this and it seems so outlandish that it would seem like we are talking of some banana republic like say, Pakistan and not the United States. It is, however, the truth!

But things don't stop here. The ballots that were counted from the absentee ballots batch were -

stacks of unusual mail-in ballots with "pristine sheets, no creases, and perfect bubbles" that went "all for Biden."

All of the ballots counted (and double-counted if you look further) were perfectly printed (including the ink in the bubble for the candidate) en masse.

Basically, the paper was all over the place and could be used to PYOB (print your own ballot) as you deem fit.

Georgia which was not won by a Democrat contender for 30 years was won by Biden by a margin of a mere 12,000 votes.

The Associated Press declared Joe Biden the winner of Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes on Thursday, after state election officials there said a hand tally of ballots cast in the presidential race confirmed the former vice president leads President Donald Trump by roughly 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million counted. (Source: Biden wins Georgia, ending long losing streak for Democrats / AP)

Georgia was a battleground state and gave Biden 36 electoral votes.

There was no accountability for what happened. And worse, anyone even speaking about it was censured and canceled by social media platforms.

Now let us get to decidedly the dirtiest part of American Democracy as it has shaped up over the years.

The Deep State and Collusion

A report was published by the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on November 6th, 2023.

It was called Weaponization of "Disinformation" Pseudo-experts and bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partners with Universities to Censor Americans' Political Speech

What does this report speak about?

This Election Integrity Partnership was at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Interesting aside - how the mandate of The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) was not just the US but also other countries when it came to elections. Just remember that from here on.

The EIP had four partners:

1. Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) - Please see that Stanford has removed the entire SIO page from its website. We have linked the URL from Archive.org.
2. The University of Washington Center for an Informed Public (CIP) - Their proud mission is to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse
3. Graphika - call themselves the "cartographers of the internet age". The company "leverages the power of artificial intelligence to create the world’s most detailed maps of social media landscapes". Its partners include - Harvard, Oxford, and DARPA (DARPA = CIA).
4. The Atlantic Council - is heavily staffed by US intelligence (specifically the CIA) experts, for example:
   1. Matthew Burrows, Director of the Strategic Foresight Initiative at Atlantic Council, used to work for the CIA
   2. Stanley Sloan, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, formerly worked at the CIA
   3. Markus Garlauskas, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council, was a National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council (NIC).
   4. Ronald Marks, formerly at the CIA, is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.
   5. Nicholas Eftimiades, formerly at CIA and DIA, is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

So what was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) really trying to do? Rather innocuous sounding - Monitoring the election.

Alex Stamos was the head of the Election Integrity Partnership. In one of the emails, he discussed the monitoring ideas.

The entire group's work has been explained very clearly here.

One reason for this could be that Graphika is directly funded and staffed by those same American organizations. The New York-based company is not particularly transparent about its sources of income; however, on its website, it lists the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)  and the Minerva Initiative – a research program under the Department of Defense – as its chief “partners” in funding. Government records show it also sought and received $3 million in grants from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force over the previous two fiscal years. In addition to this, Graphika has partnered with a number of organizations, including the Atlantic Council, a NATO-offshoot think tank funded by the arms industry and the U.S. government. The Atlantic Council has been at the forefront of both vigorously wiping pages and accounts critical of the U.S. government and spreading lurid accusations about the power of Russia to influence foreign elections and media. Graphika and the Atlantic Council have joined forces on a number of different projects, including a 2019 joint report, on social media bots. The two organizations are also a part of the Election Integrity Partnership, a group that purports to protect the American political system from fake news. Another member of that group (and a listed partner of Graphika on its website) is the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), an organization perhaps most famous for its work in convincing Twitter to delete accounts for the crime of “undermining faith in the NATO alliance.” The SIO is led by Alex Stamos, who is on the board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. In addition, Graphika lists among its partners The Syria Campaign, an organization dedicated to drumming up support and funding for the controversial group the White Helmets. (Source: "Graphika: The Deep State’s Beard for Controlling the Information Age" / Monthly Review)

With such players in tow, it is interesting to see how this group would impact an election.

Pseudoscience of Disinformation

The report we shared earlier discusses what was happening under the hood of 'monitoring disinformation'. One quote from the report is extremely noteworthy.

Here is the section of the report that discusses the election interference (or rather rigging, as Vivek Ramaswamy clearly called it out) under the garb of managing information.

The process was quite straightforward although couched in secrecy and political speak.

The targets were always those who were critical or political opponents of the Democratic Party and its established narratives.

Here are some examples.

Do you see something remarkable in this? It is a dictatorship no matter how you "beautify this turd".

Why is this a Breakdown of the American Democracy?

Should we even be asking this question anymore?

Vivek Ramaswamy is the voice funded by his own work, intellect, and entrepreneurship which has risen against the "prevailing order".

An order that is made up of both the parties and all imagined hues and partisanships that essentially work together - against the interests and more importantly the lives of US citizens and others alike!

There is no going back from here.

Whether it is Donald Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy - one side of the overwhelming political spectrum is calling for the complete dismantling of the "deep state."

The other side - is the deep state.

Many years from now when we look back, the opening remarks by Vivek Ramaswamy in the 3rd Republican Primary Debate will prove to be epochal. The coalescing of public awareness of the "deep state" and its tentacles has suddenly gotten a boost. It will not stop!

(All that we discussed today also has direct implications for India as a country. We will bring that up later in another post.)

Video Corner: Is Consciousness a Miracle?

This is an interesting conversation between Sadhguru and Harvard cognitive scientist Prof. Steven Pinker as they explore this profound question at a fascinating discussion on science and spirituality, hosted by the Sadhguru Center for a Conscious Planet, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Moderated by Harvard Medical School's Dr. Bala Subramaniam.

Please watch it for its fascinating difference of approaches.