Has America Become a Police State?

Tuesday, April 4, 2023, is a sad day in America. The arrest and arraignment of former President Donald Trump is evidence that the United States is no longer the shining city on a hill for other nations to use as an example. America is sliding down the slippery slope to becoming a banana republic when political parties arrest the leader of their opposition party.

For the record, Trump was arraigned today at the Manhattan Criminal Court on a 34-count indictment accusing him of falsifying business records in the first degree. Trump pleaded not guilty. Later in the day, he stated that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his legal team want Trump to settle the matter. However, Trump plans to fight the charges.

The indictment was sealed until the arraignment. However, the charging document contained little besides the actual charges. The indictment alleges that Trump falsified his business records “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” However, there is no mention of the “other crime” in the indictment, and Bragg struggled to explain the indictment in public remarks after the arraignment.

The story began in 2006 when two women – pornography actress Stephanie Clifford (AKA Stormy Daniels) and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year – claimed that they had sexual relations with Trump. The former POTUS was then married to Melania and denied the claims. When Trump decided to run for POTUS, the two women decided to go public with their stories. Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 “hush money” to Daniels from his own money and was repaid by the Trump Organization. The payments were put in the company books as “legal expenses.” Daniels signed a nondisclosure agreement – both legal and common in the settlement of high-profile civil matters.

Cohen also arranged for David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, to pay $150,000 to McDougal for the exclusive rights to her story to keep it from ever being published. Bragg claims that Cohen was not Trump’s attorney in January 2017 when the “legal expenses” were paid. In their article in The Daily Signal, John G. Malcolm and Cully Stimson wrote the following information. 

In 2018, after the Daniels-McDougal imbroglios came to light, Cohen pleaded guilty to myriad federal offenses, including tax evasion, bank fraud, perjury before Congress, making an excessive campaign contribution (the Daniels payment), and causing an unlawful corporate campaign contribution (the McDougal payment).

As the statement of facts contends, Cohen claims that he spoke to Trump and others involved in the presidential campaign about these payments beforehand.

Pecker was granted immunity, but his National Enquirer paid a $187,500 find to the Federal Election Commission after the FEC concluded that the $150,000 payment to McDougal was an illegal corporate campaign contribution that had been arranged in coordination with the Trump campaign team, including Cohen.

In another article published in The Daily Signal, Dennis Prager explained why today’s events look like communism to him. He studied communism in graduate school and was a fellow at the Russian Institute of Columbia’s School of International Affairs. “I cite this in order to make this point: In my wildest dreams, I never imagined what I was studying would ever apply to the United States of America, the freest country in world history.” 

Prager continued, “I assumed that communism was, for various reasons, something that happened elsewhere – most obviously, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, and North Korea.” Two of Prager’s “various reasons” were: (1) the absence of freedom in the history of those countries, and (2) all those countries were, with the exception of Cuba, outside of Western civilization.” Now, he recognizes that he was wrong.

Communism – or if you will, left-wing fascism and totalitarianism – is coming to America and Canada, and (a bit more gradually) to Australia and New Zealand.

Incredibly – or maybe not so incredibly – more than 200 years of unprecedented and unrivaled liberty and commitment to Judeo-Christian values and reasons, and all the unparalleled achievements of Western civilization, have come to mean nothing to about half of the American people and to virtually every one of its major institutions.

Prager described how the universities are “moral and intellectual wastelands,” how medical schools “are embracing Soviet-like science,” and how law schools behave as though they are members of “the Soviet Communist Youth League” or “the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany.”

The greatest of all freedoms, that of speech, is disappearing. Since Lenin, no left-wing institution or country has ever allowed dissent, and the Left in America – which is elected and defended by liberals – is no exception. Already almost half of all college students say they do not believe in free speech for “hate speech,” which, of course, means they are for suppressing all speech with which the Left differs.

Perhaps even more than in the Soviet Union, lunacy has replaced reason. In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the provincial agency in charge of education has announced that the notion that there is only one correct answer in mathematics is an expression of white supremacy. The Oregon Education Department has announced the same thing. The American Medical Association has declared that no American birth certificates should list the sex/gender of a child – the child will decide that later.

Prager discussed how children are being taken to drag queen shows to teach them that sex/gender is “nonbinary” and that “human beings are not sexually divided into male and female” – different than all other members of the animal kingdom. He discussed the damage done to children by “America’s Sovietized teachers’ unions” who closed schools for nearly two years.

Prager included the “Justice Department, about half of our judges, and our security agencies” as being “well on their way to becoming what the Soviet ministry of justice, Soviet security agencies, and Soviet judges were: tools of the ruling party.”

Prager did not leave the mainstream media out of his scathing review. He said that they, “with few exceptions, are as uncommitted to truth as were the organs of the Soviet Communist Party, Pravda, and Izvestia. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, and PBS play the same role for the Left and therefore the Democratic Party.” He ended his article with this comment: “It was only a matter of time until the Left would arrest a former president of the opposition party.”