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Are we living in a true democracy? A Socratic dialogue between an American and a citizen of Athens - New York Daily News

Much has been written about Donald Trump and his Presidency. Articles giving psychological assessments, or a list of ethical and impeachable violations, or how his character is lacking to lead properly or the pending Russian investigations. A lot of focus on Trump, who he is and how he and his Administration operate. Also, plenty of "shock and mock" over his statements via Twitter.

While it's important to document all of this and to persist with and protect the Mueller and other investigations, this country is in dire need of learning how to prevent this from happening again. In order to do that, we as a nation need to find out what is the root cause of the elected government we have at the moment. And how to prevent it from happening again. We can vote them out, but they might get voted back in, unless we as a society change. And it is up to the people who vote to understand what makes a candidate a danger to democracy and our Constitution. At this very moment,Trump supporter Kid Rock is trailing Debbie Stabenow for the Senate in Michigan by 8 percentage points. The crazy is out of control.

A while ago I wrote a blog called America's Embrace of Ignorance, which can be seen here. I outlined the continued actions of Congress to legislate based on beliefs and feelings over facts. The snowball wielding Senator Inhofe who tried to use the snowball to "prove" Climate Change isn't real, is one of many examples that my article pointed to as the ignorance being woven into our Government and the constituency.

I saw something THEN that was worrying, I knew one day we'd have someone who would completely "snowball" America into destruction because of this lack of truth, facts and reality. This boiling pot, if you will, of simmering ignorance just waiting to spill over. And two years later we got Donald Trump. It is the culmination of years of the republican party fostering bigotry, racism, sexism and slamming education and the press. Full stop.

Trump is not an anomaly, he is the republican party. Same beliefs, he just says it louder in raw slang --sometimes vulgar or incomprehensible (Covefefe) English--and on Twitter--but make no mistake it is the same message that the GOP has been selling for years.

And here we are, inside of that perfect storm that gave us the Trump Administration on the verge of our Democracy being destroyed and inside of a full Constitutional crisis looking for a reason why all of this is acceptable to some Americans.

Peak societal ignorance. That's why.

By education I don't mean Harvard, but a basic societal grasp on facts and reality. It doesn't help Americans when Congress continually cuts public education funds. Education is the answer to ignorance. Even the most basic knowledge of civic duty is lacking. If this weren't the case then maybe 62 million people who voted for Trump might have thought twice when he campaigned on legislating to ban people based on their religion, a direct violation of one the most important founding principles in our Constitution -Freedom of Religion.

The key is to not have a society that fosters and encourages beliefs over truth and facts--hint we are in one. This allows for dangerous ignorance to flourish. We have seen lie after lie in this administration, but very little fallout from lying. Trump voters want to believe. And that's what the polls show. So, no matter what Trump does his voters are sticking by him. It's their belief "he is the one" despite the facts and reality that show otherwise.Proof:

The above is a societal problem, a problem we need to admit to and defeat.

This failure to "correct course" when danger arises is how democracies crumble.

Another major contributing factor to societal ignorance is the tactic of attacking the press (something republicans have been doing since Goldwater). This is done to control the information flow to their voters. The message is: The press is nuts folks, facts don't matter, listen to me! In the era of Trump this has grown to alarming new levels of danger--banning the press, off camera pressers and threats to the press and some news organizations labeled as "fake news". This has the overall effect of negating facts and reality in favor of that politician's words and personal beliefs. Indeed this is a real disaster for the Constitutionally protected Free Press. Free Press is the foundation of a free society, when it's gone so is freedom.

And as we see everyday in the Trump Administration, it's serious.

When a President campaigns on removing 51 Million Americans--most of whom are kids--from insurance coverage, which would cost 43,000 Americans their lives per year---Americans should reflect on why they are apathetic to that suffering and loss of life and why they want to vote for it. Or why they think it's ok to shaft women who need maternity related healthcare, in a country that has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Apathy towards each other has led to paralyzing polarization and is killing our nation's progress.This apathy is not only for their fellow Americans, but for themselves. The " I'm a brave, brave boot strap patriot who don't need no help", even though you need help and use Obamacare the most is destroying us.

Don't lose sight of the future because of the political noise.

We need to start from the ground up and build a strong, educated society that is not afraid of the truth. A society that uses their mind to think and assess right from wrong and knows exactly what Constitutionally protected rights are. Facts need to be taken seriously and not denied in favor wanting to believe otherwise. When people go to the doctor and he/she shows them facts via the lab and imaging they don't say, "No doctor that's not the truth I know." They believe the facts presented. The exact same should be true when facts are presented to Americans. The truth should be seen and acknowledged-- on climate change, on pollution and on healthcare. When their President lies and when corruption and immorality is political policy-- the majority of Americans should see it, know it and rebuke it. Loudly. We should care about one another. We should care whether someone's child dies because of our vote. At the moment we don't.

This societal sickness - civic ignorance- is spilling over onto the rest of Americans and destroying our Democracy as we know it. Let's hope we can pull back, change course and save this 241 year old republic and our Constitution from this destructive, vile ignorance.

~The ignorance of one voter impairs the security of all~

The Morning Email

Wake up to the day's most important news.

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Ignorance, Killer of Democracy - HuffPost

Israel plans to shut down Al Jazeera's Jerusalem office, stop transmitting its broadcasts and strip the Qatar-based channel's journalists of their credentials, the country's communications minister said Sunday.

Ayoub Kara accused the channel of "incitement" as he announced the plans for shuttering the station's operations.

"Freedom of expression is not freedom to incite," he said, according to a ministry statement. "Democracy has limits."

Al Jazeera said it was unclear when the Israeli government would act on Kara's request. A legal amendment will be made to adopt the measures, the ministry statement said, with the law updated to reflect the "current geopolitical reality."

"Changing the law in order to shut down a media organization for political reasons is a slippery slope," the executive secretary of Israel's Foreign Press Association, Glenys Sugarman, told the news agency Reuters.

Accusing Al Jazeera of incitement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed last month to shut down its Jerusalem bureau amid clashes between Israeli authorities and Palestinian worshipers over access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque site in Jerusalem's Old City. However, his office declined to give specific examples of content they deemed to have stoked tensions.

Al Jazeera has accused Israel of siding with Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that are imposing an economic blockade on Qatar and have severed diplomatic relations with the kingdom. These Arab states accuse Qatar of backing terrorism and have demanded the shutdown of Qatari-funded Al Jazeera.

Saudi Arabia and Jordan have closed Al Jazeera offices in recent months, while the channel's signal has been blocked in the United Arab Emirates.

"The collusion by Netanyahu with his Arab autocratic neighbors leaves little doubt that free independent media and truth are ready to be sacrificed as collateral damage in the power politics of the region," Al Jazeera's Jerusalem bureau chief, Walid Omary, wrote in an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "Since its inception, Al Jazeera has provided Israel with a rare conduit for airing its viewpoints to Arab and Muslim audiences and participating in dialogue with them."

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Israel plans to shut down Al Jazeera office, says that 'democracy has limits' - Chicago Tribune

The 2016 Panama Papers leaks were supposed to be a tool for the forces of democracy. They were meant to expose corruption and reinvigorate institutions. By one reading, the resignation of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after the countrys Supreme Court declared him guilty in a corruption trial relating to the papers seems like a case in point. In fact, however, it shows that the leaks have become a tool of the anti-democratic in some instances. In Pakistan, the revelations came as the country was undergoing a return to full democracy. Now that process has been set back.

Part of the problem is the way Pakistans media handled the leaks. The countrys prominent outlets had long been censored and vilified by the military and powerful civilian politicians alike. Journalists who have spoken critically of the establishment have been attacked fiercely; for example, the journalist Hamid Mir, who was shot in Karachi, had irked Pakistans dominant intelligence agency by critiquing its activities against other journalists and civilians. The result of such cases was excessive airtime and a free pass for pro-establishment opinion.

When the Panama leaks came out, however, the media opened to voices critical to the sitting party (if not the entire establishment). Conventional wisdom quickly came to hold that the prime minister should resign. Most mainstream television programs organized panels vilifying Sharif for looting the nation. And the majority of the public went along, blaming him for the corruption that has plagued the nation for a long time.

At the forefront of the media campaign has been Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Justice Party, who had tried to galvanize the nation against Sharif since the leader took office in 2013. Although Khan presents himself as a pro-democratic leader, he has at times beencalled a puppetof the military. In fact, he once admitted to having been brought into politics with the help of former military dictator Pervez Musharraf. Critics assert that the purpose was to counter

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Democracy After Sharif in Pakistan - Foreign Affairs

Historian and Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean, in her very important new book, "Democracy in Chains," alerts Americans to the "single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the Billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance." The book was recently recommended by Opra Winfrey.

MacLean is a historian of social movements and their impact on public policy. She became interested in Virginia's decision, made after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, to issue state-subsidized education vouchers for all-white private schools. Her research led to James McGill Buchanan, a professor at George Mason University, who created, in 1956, an academic center with a quiet political agenda: to defeat what he considered a perverted form of liberalism by training a new line of thinkers.

Confidential letters between Buchanan and Charles Koch, from 1997-1998, disclosed Charles Koch's investments, beginning in the 1970s, of millions of dollars in Buchanan's Center for Study of Public Choice Program. It became a research and design center for a project to train operatives to staff far-flung and purposely separate, yet intrinsically connected, institutions funded by the Koch brothers and their large network of fellow wealthy donors.

Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries Inc., is shown in this undated company handout photo. (unk / The Denver Post)

It was not until 2012 that Americans began to sense that something extraordinarily troubling was happening. "In 2011 the new governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, put forth legislation to strip public employees of all their collective bargaining rights, teachers were attacked in New Jersey, large cuts to education occurred in several states with laws to enable unregulated charter schools. In 2011 and 2012 legislators in 41 states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how. The movement went national with an all-out effort to oppose the Affordable Care Act."

Nancy MacLean provides knowledge about the vast plan to destroy American democracy that is moving with shock-and-awe speed. Thirty-three states are already totally controlled by the Republican Party. It is the plan of ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council), as disclosed on their website, to hold a constitutional convention and rewrite the U.S. Constitution to provide governance by and for the billionaires. Saving democracy is up to us. We the people.

Shirley Jin lives in Boulder.

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Shirley Jin: Democracy in chains - Boulder Daily Camera