The Choice That Is Before Us

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Abraham Lincoln said it in the Gettysburg Address: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Schoolchildren used to memorize those words before our moral superiors decided that Lincoln, despite ending slavery in the United States, was a white male after all, and thus no kind of role model. The loss has been ours, for the nation would be much better off today if more Americans had ever taken the time to ponder what “government of the people, by the people, for the people” really means, and why it matters.

Lily Tang Williams just gave us a reminder. As I wrote about here Sunday, Tang Williams, who is a candidate for the House of Representatives from New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District, debated her Democrat opponent, Maggie Goodlander, last Thursday. A native of Communist China, Tang Williams sharply rebuked Goodlander’s class warfare rhetoric and reminded the world of the massive gulf between cosseted elitists such as Goodlander and ordinary, hardworking Americans: “You are wealthy, you are worth 20 million to 30 million dollars. How do you know about regular people suffering?”

That was too much for another elitist on X, Yuan Yi Zhu, a self-described “assistant professor of international relations and international law,” who rushed to Goodlander’s defense: “America is great because you can be goldplated elite (Groton, Yale, Yale Law, then Deep State, married to the national security advisor) and you have to debate an insane libertarian Chinese immigrant mum who will insult you in broken English and she may beat you at the election.”

What’s insane about Lily Tang Williams? Why, she disagrees with Yuan Yi Zhu and Maggie Goodlander, that’s what. And Goodlander, as Yuan Yi Zhu reminds us, is “goldplated elite.” She went to the best schools. She’s married to the Biden-Harris regime’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan. How could a “libertarian Chinese immigrant mum,” insane or not, dare to presume that she could be a better, more effective member of the House of Representatives than a graduate of Groton and Yale, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division?

The effrontery of it all is what stings the left most of all. Government “of the people, by the people, for the people”? That’s just rhetoric for the rubes. Government is really best left to the experts, the highly trained apparatchiks who know better than you and me. The people can’t be trusted to choose leaders who know what’s best. In a perfect world, as far as the left is concerned, Lily Tang Williams would simply bow to Maggie Goodlander’s expertise and bow out of the race.

In the same way, back in 2016, John Kerry, the Beltway insider’s Beltway insider, gave us his expert assessment: “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,” he declared. “I want to make that very clear with all of you. I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, ‘Well, the Arab world is in a different place now. We just have to reach out to them. We can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians.’ No. No, no, and no.” A few years later, Donald Trump astonished the world — and proved Kerry wrong — by spearheading the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab states.

How could he? What could this — this real estate salesman possibly know about statecraft? How dare he show up John Kerry’s vaunted expertise as so much hollow puffery? As PJM’s Charlie Martin put it Saturday, “The more I’ve watched Donald Trump’s political career since he came out as a Republican, the more I think the Never-Trump derangement has more to do with perceived class than his political positions. He’s not a member of the Club. Oh, he has the money, he has a record as being ‘civic minded’ — but he committed lèse-majesté by challenging the queen, and worse yet, he won.”

Yes. Trump is no more an expert than Lily Tang Williams. Like her, he is just an American with common sense and a great deal of lived experience. Giving such people the power to govern in our system of checks and balances and limited government is what it means to have a government that is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

If Harris wins on Tuesday, the idea of such government will suffer another blow, and the “experts,” as multiply discredited as they are (remember the 51 “intelligence professionals” who assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”), will be further entrenched in power and unaccountable to the American people.

The American people? Why should the elites care what they think? They didn’t go to Groton or Yale.

At PJ Media, we’re not “experts” either — that is, we’re not the sort of journalists and analysts who will tell you about the events of the day the way they were taught to see them in journalism school, which means from a far-left perspective. Nor do we engage in the “experts'” proclivity for distortions and outright lies in service of the left’s agenda.

Instead, we give you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth — journalism that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people. If you haven’t joined us yet, now is the time: the next few days and weeks are certain to be eventful, and you don’t want to be at the mercy of the “experts” during crunch time.

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