Over the weekend, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), supposedly one of our elite organizations for foreign policy considerations and analysis, sank to the level of mainstream media talking heads.
CFR announced to its Foreign Affairs subscribers a full propaganda campaign of weekly publications titled On the Ballot. With blatant language inversion, this series claims its readers should support Kamala Harris as a standard-bearer for “democracy,” while ignoring her Fascism/Marxism. In their presentation, she is opposed in the election by “illiberal populism” presented as authoritarianism. Populism is not a well-defined term but is generally described as “for the people.” Trump’s name is not used.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party advocate for higher spending (which will cause inflation and further deterioration of the dollar), higher taxes, use of the judicial system to punish political opponents, use of the education system for political indoctrination, higher corporate taxes, impose wage and price controls, impose a wealth tax, nationalize health care and the pharmaceutical companies, a weaker military, more regulations, investigations, and audits by an expanded bureaucracy.
In California, she was known for attempting to use the State agencies as weapons against people and organizations for which she had a grudge. All this is counter to the fundamental precepts of democracy, yet the Democratic Party, Kamal Harris, and now, the CFR label their actions as a program to “save democracy.”
This is a perversion of language that is worthy of Orwell’s Newspeak.
CFR’s e-mail announcing this blatant and planned persistent propaganda campaign came with its Subject: Democracy vs. Autocracy – which, upon further reading, is exposed as a great example of twisted terminology.
Because of their concerns over the profound fundamental issues of this election, they announce they are “launching a weekly newsletter through the remainder of this campaign. It will be your go-to place for our coverage of the election.” In their telling, it is clear Kamala is our “democratic” savior and Trump is our evil “illiberal populist” threat.
They start this campaign with a strange analysis of the status of democracy in the world by Francis Fukuyama: The Year of Elections Has Been Good for Democracy – But the Biggest Test Will Come in America. He not only joins the language corruption and pleads that Kamala will save democracy, but also insists that Trump threatens it. As noted, all evidence is to the contrary.
Fukuyama goes on a world tour discussing how democracy is being rolled back worldwide. He describes how country after country rejects democracy in favor of authoritarianism. His analysis is a thorough, worldwide review of why his 1989 speech, his 1989 National Interest paper, and his 1992 book on the “End of History” (for which he received much recognition, accolades, and prominence) were naïve and so completely wrong.
His analysis discredits the very title of his essay.
Fukuyana has been trying to defend his original thesis that the triumph of democracy was complete and permanent against all evidence for three decades. It is time for him to quit, if he is a serious scholar. This essay should be embarrassing, especially because he did not include an admission that the world did not turn out the way he thought it should. If he is just another academic political hack, then maybe not. This publication makes him one of Marxism’s useful idiots.
CFR also included a re-publication of How Democracies Can Win, an old essay by Samantha Power (a guaranteed tedious read). Publishing these essays as propaganda would seem to be an insult to the intelligence of CFR's readers who, one would presume, are sufficiently well-informed to see through the language inversion.
But, evidently, CFR does not have that high an opinion of its subscribers. By joining the propaganda war and publishing these essays with the intention of influencing the election, CFR abandons all pretense of analytical, scholarly, or investigative objectivity in their publications. They reject the statement of editorial principles of their founding editor, Cary Coolidge, “to tolerate wide differences of opinion” and “not represent any consensus of beliefs” proclaimed in every edition of Foreign Affairs.