Who is Really a Danger to American Democracy?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

This coming November, Americans will be voting in mid-term elections for numerous local, state, and national offices, including both chambers of Congress. And in their opposition to the hated President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is waging uninterrupted ideological and political warfare against him, even as the country is involved in a Middle Eastern war.

Insisting that the president and his MAGA movement is an existential danger to America, the idea of “restoring democracy” after Trump is eliminated is widespread on the left. Various scholars in fact contend that the U.S. is already governed by an authoritarian regime. 

Much of the evidence they cite, like Trump appointing “loyalists,” consists of the president exercising his duly constituted authority. Other issues, such as the investigation of Trump’s opponents, is retaliation for similar activities by Democrats between Trump’s two election victories. And unlike genuine dictators, Trump keeps getting stymied by many federal judges, include the justices of the Supreme Court, who block many of his initiatives.

It is in fact the Democratic Party that is testing and trying to overturn democratic norms. Most central has been the denial of Trump’s legitimacy.  Hillary Clinton in 2019 described him as an “illegitimate president” who stole the 2016 election.  Trump, perhaps understandably, in turn denied Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, pointing to easily manipulated mail-in voting and non-citizen participation, encouraged by the Biden administration’s open-border policies, which allowed upwards of 20 million people into the country.

Democrats advocate for making Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia states, guaranteeing four more Democrats in the senate. They want to strip states of the power to draw electoral boundaries and to insist on in-person voting by actual citizens. One example: the recent Proposition 50 in California, advocated by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and passed by the state’s Democrat majority, which will limit the representation of Republicans in a state where Democrats already control the entire government. 

It will redraw the state’s Congressional map to favour Democrats, a major victory for the party in a high-stakes national redistricting fight that could determine who controls the House of Representatives. If Virginia voters approve a redistricting plan April 21, theirs will also be a more Democrat-friendly House delegation.

The left has been targeting those members of the Supreme Court who were appointed by Trump. Angry at their position on an abortion issue before the court in 2020, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declaimed: “I want to tell you, (Neill) Gorsuch, I want to tell you, (Brett) Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.” The party would like to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges to guarantee control there. 

Then there is the use of mass mobilization against government, notably in the Women’s March occupations of the Capitol and Senate complexes in 2018 and the months-long riots against local police and courts during the first Trump term in the summer of 2020. More recently, there are the multicity efforts to obstruct immigration enforcement and the massive “No Kings” protests in the second term. Democrats want to expand “sanctuary” cities and an amnesty for “undocumented” migrants, whom they rightly assume will vote Democratic as citizens. And while the riot of Jan.  6, 2021 at the Capitol can be blamed on Trump, it was in the context of the violence by the left throughout the previous year.

Perhaps the most insidious threat to democracy is the partisan press and its unholy alliance with the Democratic Party.  With few mainstream exceptions, the media is overwhelmingly aligned with Democratic narratives, agendas, and policies. The overwhelming percentage of professional journalists in the national “legacy” media identify as Democrats. Public broadcaster National Public Radio self-reported that its Washington D.C. editorial staff consists of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans.  The most vaunted news authorities such as the New York Times lean left not only in their opinion sections but in the framing of their news coverage.  The Washington Post has been even worse.

That’s how journalistic malpractice like the coverage of Clinton/Obama-spawned “Russiagate” conspiracy theory was foisted upon the public to discredit Trump. There was also the concerted media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election. Most egregious was the way the media insisted Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, and never fitter to run for a second term in 2024. This probably cost Democrats the White House.

Then there is academia, where instructors overwhelmingly identify as liberal Democrats, outnumbering conservative Republicans as much as ten to one, depending on department and campus.  And of course, there is Hollywood and its leftist cultural influence.  Look no further than California for one-party Democrat rule.

Finally, former president Barack Obama continue to interfere in America’s politics in ways no previous officeholder did. His predecessor, George W. Bush retired to his Texas ranch once he left the White House. Obama by contrast kept a home in Washington after 2016 and it’s been an unofficial headquarters for the Democratic Party ever since. He still calls the shots in many ways. Yet no journalist in the city reported on this despite it happening right under their noses.

 So -- just who is the threat to American democracy now? Is the appellation “Democratic” for the party perhaps a misnomer?

 

The Small Islands Caught in the Middle East Conflict

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Dailt Gleaner

 

Sometimes very obscure places most people have never heard of assume importance as a byproduct of conflicts between faraway countries. And then they suddenly become front page news.

Such is the case of the Chagos Islands, an archipelago in the “middle of nowhere” – actually, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And they have been a bone of contention between Great Britain and its former Indian Ocean colony of Mauritius for decades. What’s this all about and why is it suddenly so noteworthy?

It’s because of the current Middle East war. On March 20, Iran targeted the Indian Ocean military base jointly operated by Britan and the United States on Diego Garcia, one of the islands, with two ballistic missiles.

The U.S. has described the Diego Garcia base as “an all but indispensable platform” for security operations in the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa. Britain initially refused to let the base be used for attacks on Iran, but after Iran responded with strikes on its neighbors, the U.K. said American bombers could use Diego Garcia.

The Chagos archipelago stretches more than 350 kilometres n the middle of the Indian Ocean; it is 500 kilometres from the Maldives, some 1,500 kilometres south of India, and even further from the Seychelles and Mauritius, to which it was attached when the latter was a British possession. The 55 little islands have a total land area of only 64 square kilometres and no longer have any native inhabitants.

Britain detached the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, three years before that island state gained its independence. During the Vietnam war, the United States realised that a base on the 28 square kilometre island of Diego Garcia, at the southern tip of the archipelago, would allow it to intervene across a large part of the globe, and control major sea transport routes for hydrocarbons and raw materials.

So secret talks concluded with the United Kingdom in 1966 saw Washington lease Diego Garcia. Britain removed the local population, some 1,000 islanders, from the Chagos Archipelago, to make way for it. Shared with the U.K., it became Washington’s most important asset in the vast Indo-Pacific region west of Pearl Harbour.

The government of Mauritius had long argued that it was illegally forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from the U.K. in 1968. In June 2017 the United Nations General Assembly voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule on the validity of their detachment from the territory of Mauritius, which became independent three years later. Mauritius told the ICJ that the territorial division had been accepted “under duress.”

In February 2019, the ICJ issued an historic advisory opinion declaring that the United Kingdom’s administration of the Chagos Archipelago was unlawful and that sovereignty should be returned to Mauritius. The court held that the detachment of the archipelago from Mauritius at the time of independence violated international law because it had not been based on a “free and genuine expression of the people concerned.”

It added that Britain had an obligation “to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible and that all member states must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonization of Mauritius.” In 2021, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Universal Postal Union also issued administrative rulings stating that Britain has no sovereignty over the islands.

Years of protracted negotiations between Whitehall and Mauritius then ensued with little progress -- but suddenly moved forward with lightning speed with the election of the new British Labour government in July 2024.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced a major agreement just three months later to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, while securing the future of the joint U.S.-U.K. military base on Diego Garcia. Mauritius will be able to begin a program of resettlement on the Chagos Islands, though not on Diego Garcia.

But President Mohamed Muizzu of the Maldives has formally told the U.K. that it does not recognise the deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. “The government of the Maldives maintains the firm position that, by virtue of historical and geographical proximity, it holds a prior claim to sovereign rights over the Chagos Archipelago.”

The deal has also attracted criticism from the opposition Conservative Party in Britain and officials in the Trump administration in Washington. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the prime minister was “negotiating a secret deal to surrender British territory and taxpayers in this country will pay for the humiliation.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio worried the deal posed a “serious threat,” arguing it gives the islands to a country aligned with China. Mauritius has had a free trade agreement with China since 2019. Commerce between the two countries has increased tenfold since 2000 and nearly doubled in just the last three years. Both are explicitly committed to closer ties and signed a bilateral currency agreement at the end of 2024.

While the May 2025 deal still faces major criticism, Britain will most likely return the archipelago to Mauritius but allow the U.K. to retain administrative control over the base for 99 years – at a very hefty sum.