On Sunday's Meet the Press, Chuck Todd gathered around him John Heilemann, a leftist journalist; Marianna Sotomayor, a leftist journalist; Brendan Buck, an ostensible Republican who worked for Paul Ryan and John Boehner; and Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a leftist journalist.  All five were unanimous: democracy in America is over because Americans don't believe that Biden honestly won his seat in the White House.  The hyperbole was thick in the air, along with more than a soupçon of hypocrisy and a huge dollop of fear.

Sundance, at The Conservative Treehouse, caught the roundtable and summed it up thusly:

The NBC media panel for Meet the Press is absolutely apoplectic about their inability to destroy President Donald Trump and his supportive base of pragmatic, awakened Americans.   The pearl-clutching and fear are palpable, as the leftist roundtable contemplates future elections that may deconstruct decades of election control, manipulation, fraud and falsehood.

That's exactly right.

The starting point for the panel discussion was an overwrought article that Bart Gellman wrote for The Atlantic in which he claimed that Trump's "Next Coup Has Already Begun."  The premise is that

Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart the victory at their polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Todd asked whether that was hyperbole or fact, and every one of the assembled guests assured him that this was a fact.  (See video at the bottom of this post.)  I can't dissect everything they said, but a few things leaped out.

Marianna Sotomayor (no relation to the Supreme Court justice) is horrified that "you still, on Capitol Hill, have many Republicans denying that that was an insurrection."  Yeah, pretty much, because unarmed grannies walking through the Capitol taking pictures while cops shoot and beat women is not an insurrection, no matter how disgustingly cowardly our representatives are.  If you want scenes of insurrection, just cast your mind back to what leftists were doing when Christine Blowsy Fraud was defaming Brett Kavanaugh and Elizabeth Warren was openly encouraging them.

John Heilemann contends that 20 to 30 million people are lusting after political violence, which he immediately analogizes to lynching.  It's as if 2020 — riots, looting, assault, and murder, powered by BLM, Antifa, and a generalized leftist mob — never happened.  Moreover, he claims that the individual states are setting up for a coup.  What he's referring to are initiatives to limit election fraud: cleaning up voter rolls, doing away with often illegal mail-in ballot initiatives, stopping vote-harvesting, etc.  So the "coup" is that elections will be more honest.

Brendan Buck, who's a political hack, in my opinion, offered a wordy take about Georgia elections.  Boiled down, he said Jody Hice is running to unseat Brad Raffensperger, who, contrary to available evidence, insisted that Fulton County ran a perfectly clean election.  If he's elected, that raises the possibility that states might not certify future elections.  Unsaid is that they would refuse to certify until they're sure election results are fraud-free.  The horror!

Kimberly Atkins Stohr, who is Black, immediately announced that the current situation is exactly like the Civil War, thanks to Trump having created clones of himself.  "[W]hat you have that's even worse is that you have an entire party — it's no longer just about Donald Trump.  It's a party that's about adopting his tactic, which is you deny the results of the last election or else you move forward with efforts to subvert democracy or else."

Denying election results?  Yes, Democrats did that:

Moving forward with efforts to subvert democracy?  Why yes, Democrats did that, too.  I believe that it was called the Russia Hoax.  There was also the Very Fine People Hoax.  The Ukraine Phone Call Hoax.  The two impeachment hoaxes.  The Grab 'Em by the Pussy Hoax.  The mass Resist movement.  And that's just what I can remember off the top of my head.  Hypocrisy, thy name is Stohr.

Meanwhile, not a word was said about the way the government has systematically violated the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment rights of the January 6 prisoners; about the unconstitutional vaccine mandates no court can stomach; about Biden's aggressive destruction of the economy; or about his administration's blatant violation of America's immigration laws, just to name a few of his actions that drag America farther from a constitutional democratic republic.

To these leftist talking heads, "democracy" means only that they win by hook or by crook and then govern unopposed.  As to that, they're quite right to be worried that their unprincipled, illegal, and hysterical behavior from 2016 through 2020 tipped off the American people to their totalitarian approach to governance.

Image: Meet the Press.  YouTube screen grab.

Correction: Jody Hice pronoun corrected

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