The Western Establishment Lacks Legitimacy

December 8, 2024 by J.B. Shurk

Romania’s Constitutional Court summarily invalidated the first-round results of its presidential election because the anti-globalist candidate, Calin Georgescu, unexpectedly won (while the globalist, Brussels-aligned, polling favorite was ignominiously booted from the race). The high court’s official justification for defying the will of the Romanian people? It insisted that too much “Russian disinformation” on TikTok had unfairly manipulated the minds of voters. Wherever would the Romanian Establishment have learned that dirty trick? Probably by watching its NATO partners repeatedly do the same thing.

Wherever and whenever the entrenched “ruling class” in the West has suffered electoral defeat over the last decade, governments and their media lackeys have blamed the Russians. The United Kingdom would never have voted to withdraw from the European Union had Russian Internet trolls not poisoned the thoughts of pro-Brexit citizens. Donald Trump would never have beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016 without the help of a few Russian frat boys posting funny memes on social media. Heck, American and European provocateurs would never have had to oust the duly elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, back in 2014 had Ukrainian voters simply chosen a pro–European Union alternative when they had the chance. Sometimes, you have to delegitimize the results of democratic elections until the people get it right. Other times, you have to foment civil war until citizens learn to vote “correctly.”

The Western Establishment is giving Romanian voters a second chance to obey. In effect, NATO’s great “defenders of democracy” are saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” If you vote well, we will applaud your choice to remain a vassal of the European Union and flood your country with illegal aliens. If you vote poorly, we will make excellent use of your lands in our nuclear-tipped proxy war against Russia, as we have done in Ukraine. Hello, Romania — are you listening?

The people of Georgia apparently didn’t ,listen because they recently voted for leaders who are skeptical of joining the European Union. Their punishment for questioning Western orthodoxy and resisting eternal subservience to NATO and the E.U.? The U.S. Agency for International Development (the aid agency of choice for the Political Action Group of the CIA’s Special Activities Center) is doing its best to break Georgia just as it broke Ukraine ten years ago. Riots and mob violence cost money, but American and European spooks are eager to give rebels a helping hand. Wait a second. If the United States and its NATO partners are actively subverting foreign elections and funding resistance movements when the “wrong” candidates win, aren’t they engaging in the exact kind of election interference operations that the West regularly blames on Russia?

There does seem to be a pattern, doesn’t there? When Marxist globalists and other sundry champagne socialists win office, Western governments assure voters that elections are as secure as can be and that the “people have spoken” with one loud voice. When anti-globalists, conservatives, libertarians, and freedom-loving constitutionalists win elections, the same Western governments immediately blame the outcome on Russian disinformation, bigotry, voter suppression, ignorance, or other electoral skullduggery.

What is worse, whenever the Establishment fails to get its way, it does its best to undermine the will of the people (in the name of “democracy,” or something). When Marine Le Pen’s National Rally led all other parties in the first round of French elections earlier this year, Le Petit Roi Emmanuel Macron partnered with communists to deny commonsense conservatives a political victory. When Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom won the most seats in Dutch elections last year, the losing parties worked together to deny Wilders any chance of becoming prime minister. When the conservative Alternative for Germany became the country’s second most popular political party, other German parties demanded that it be banned as a “security risk for people and democracy.” When Donald Trump won the American presidency in 2016, treasonous members of the FBI and broader Intelligence Community worked with Establishment Republicans and Democrats to thwart his agenda with the continued threat of criminal investigations.

In contrast, when Joe Biden — who was never a popular politician outside his native Delaware and who is leaving the White House with some of the lowest public approval numbers in modern political history — improbably won more votes in 2020 than any past presidential candidate (including fifteen million more than Democrat demigod Barack Obama), nobody was permitted even to question his statistically implausible “victory.” Anyone who suggested that the imposition of mail-in ballots during COVID likely opened the door to mass electoral fraud was immediately labeled an “election denier.” Anyone who protested for free and fair elections near the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was labeled an “insurrectionist” and “terrorist” and became a target for the politicized FBI.

As for corruptly using the criminal justice system to lock up Donald Trump and his supporters, the United States is hardly alone in weaponizing the courts and persecuting political opponents. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and France’s Marine Le Pen are defending themselves against spurious criminal charges that may effectively bar both from holding future political office, even if they manage to avoid imprisonment. Their crimes? Just as has been the case with the American Establishment’s persecution of President Trump, the Brazilian Establishment accuses Bolsonaro of plotting a coup against his successor, while the French Establishment accuses Le Pen of fraud and financial misconduct. In reality, Bolsonaro and Le Pen are guilty only of being anti-globalist conservatives who threaten the Establishment’s continued hold on power. In the United States, Brazil, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, there is no more condemnable felony.

In the West, “the people” are afforded the “privilege” of self-government, it seems, only when they vote in accordance with the Establishment’s wishes. Otherwise, they and their elected representatives get harassed, investigated, and censored. Many are financially sanctioned, denied access to banking institutions, and cut off from the so-called “rules-based international order.” Some become targets of partisan domestic prosecutors or ambitious bureaucrats at the International Criminal Court or Interpol. Some elected officials even receive one-way tickets to prison.

The general populations fare no better. As punishment for voting “incorrectly,” subversive elements disguised as non-governmental organizations funnel money and resources to often violent political operatives. Chaos and rebellion become the order of the day. Spies and paramilitary groups initiate “color revolutions” meant to overthrow legitimately elected governments. The voting public suffers economic hardship and indiscriminate violence. If the errantly voting countries are truly unlucky, Western powers turn their nations into battlefields, drain their populations of fighting-aged men, strip their lands of natural resources, and leave survivors impoverished and irreparably divided. All in the name of “democracy.”

So, Western oligarchs, hear me out. What if we actually practiced what we preached? What if we respected the choices of sovereign nation states and refrained from bullying their voters? What if we acknowledged that Western NGOs effectively operate as propaganda organs for the E.U. and U.S.-NATO and are used to shape domestic politics no differently than the dreaded scourge of “Russian disinformation”? What if we actually valued free speech, public debate, and dissent as much as our political leaders claim? What if we arrested the growth of online censorship and the criminalization of political beliefs before these malignant self-deceptions destroy us? What if we recommitted ourselves to the moral recognition of national self-determination and rejected global empire’s stubborn insistence that might makes right?

One thing seems increasingly certain: if the Western Establishment continues to undermine the will of Western voters, the “ruling class” won’t survive long enough to start WWIII.