Nancy Pelosi traveled to the University of Oxford in April to take part in a debate with musician Winston Marshall to argue the question, “This House Believes Populism Is a Threat to Democracy.”
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Pelosi was all over it. She said during the April 25 debate that many populists reject the ideas of Democrats because they’re “poor souls who are looking for some answers,” and “refuse to accept the answers Democrats give them on particular topics due to their beliefs about ‘guns, gays, [and] God.'”
Got that? You’re too wrapped up in gun culture, fear of homosexuality, and Jesus to understand that the Democrats are your friends and want what’s best for you.
It went downhill for Pelosi from there.
Marshall, who outdueled Pelosi at every turn, argued that the term “populist” had been captured and re-defined by the elites.
“‘Populism’ has become a word used synonymously with ‘racist.’ We’ve heard ‘ethno-nationalist,’ we have ‘bigot,’ we have ‘hillbilly,’ ‘redneck,’ we have ‘deplorable,’” Marshall said. Pelosi had already tried to redefine populism by claiming it had “an ethno-nationalist character.”
What does that even mean? I doubt if Pelosi knows either.
In 2016, Barack Obama argued it was he, not Donald Trump who was the “populist. Marshall believes that after that speech, the word became a substitute for anti-democratic forces.
“If anything, Obama argued that he was the populist. If anything, Obama argued that Bernie was the populist,” he said. “Something curious happens. If you watch Obama’s speeches after that point, more and more recently, he uses the word ‘populist’ interchangeably with ‘strong man,’ ‘authoritarian.’ The word changes meaning. It becomes a negative, a pejorative, a slur.”
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The same could be said for the mainstream media. Remember when John McCain, the beloved, was known as a “populist”? It was seen by most of the media as a positive thing to be a populist. Now, it’s one step away from being Hitler.
“Today, particularly in America, the globalist left have become the establishment,” he continued. “I suppose for Mrs. Pelosi to have taken this side of the argument, she’d be arguing herself out of a job.
Marshall went on to claim that “populism is the voice of the voiceless” and that the “real threat to democracy is from the elites.”
“Now, don’t get me wrong, we need elites. If President Biden has shown us anything, we need someone to run the countries,” he said. “When the president has severe dementia, it’s not just America that crumbles, the whole world burns.”
Pelosi tried to define “democracy.”
“Democracy is the rule of law, democracy is free and fair elections, democracy is about independent judiciary, it’s about freedom of the press to have transparency and to have accountability of elected officials to the people.”
That’s fine as far as it goes. But then Pelosi started to define “the populist regime in Washington” (?) and pretty much fell off a cliff.
“Ethno-nationalistic populism, as is the threat to democracy, is about threatening what they call elites, a free press,” she said. “It’s about fighting issues that relate to free and fair elections, where we have voter suppression to the nth degree under this regime and its resistance to passing the Voting Rights Act, the John Lewis Act, all of that.”
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This is “balmy,” as they say in Oxford. The voter “suppression” lie has been debunked five times over as blacks turn out to vote in record numbers. And the “Voting Rights Act” is nothing more than a power grab by Washington to destroy local elections.
Republicans resist passing those bills because they would make horrible laws, and just because Nancy Pelosi says they’re great doesn’t mean anything. She’s a partisan hack and seeing her sully the ancient and honorable Oxford debate with her nonsense is sad.