The following is a guest post by journalist Lisa Logan.
“A republic, if you can keep it.” – Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question about what kind of government was created after signing the Constitution.
America is a Constitutional Republic with a representative form of government, not a Democracy, but a recent surge of groups from a “pro-democracy” network has designs to change that.
Many states like Utah, hungering for a return to civility after years of divisive political rhetoric, have allowed organizations connected to this movement (like UNITE’s Dignity Index) to infiltrate and influence state and local institutions to help dictate civic policy, which they might’ve reconsidered if they knew where it originated from.
This sudden “pro-democracy” push actually came from former President Biden’s administration, which launched this so-called movement to “address hate-motivated violence and foster unity” at a 2022 event at the White House called the United We Stand Summit (Figure 1).
🧵This narrative has been building since the United We Stand Summit in 2022.
— Lisa Logan (@iamlisalogan) June 17, 2024
Biden invited victims of "hate-fueled violence" to the White House to launch https://t.co/sxWSzUG5Nf & other "democracy saving" initiatives paid for by a large $1B donation from the org New Pluralists. pic.twitter.com/4zZL7kR17W
Figure 1: X Thread featuring a video clip from Biden’s United We Stand Summit
During the Summit, Biden asserted that “domestic terrorism, rooted in white supremacy, is the greatest terrorist threat to America today.” In an effort to foster dialogue and find solutions to combat this urgent threat of hate and extremism, Biden announced the launch of a new Citizens Initiative and website, “Dignity.us” that would be coordinated by a seemingly bipartisan team of former White House Domestic Policy Council members, and funded by a billion dollar investment from a Rockefeller-Fetzer-Koch group called the “New Pluralists.” This initiative became the placeholder for the eventual rollout of the Dignity Index, which the original Dignity.us website oddly now redirects to.
The Dignity Index
The Dignity Index was created by collaboration with Utah State University and UNITE, an organization owned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s cousin, Tim Shriver. It uses an eight-point scale to “measure the level of contempt or dignity in a selected passage of speech.”
Who, though, gets to decide what constitutes “dignity” or “contempt”?
In a 2022 debate that the Index was used for, Utah Senator Mike Lee scored lower on the Dignity Index than challenger Evan McMullin because he pointed out that McMullin was making statements with a “cavalier, reckless disregard for the truth.” This was after McMullin made several false, unsupported accusations that Lee was involved in a fake electors plot to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. Would lying be acceptable in this debate, then, if it was done “with dignity”?
Freedom of Speech, but not Freedom of Reach
The Dignity Index says they’re just trying to disincentivize the option of using contempt in political discussions (claiming that fear of this is the biggest inhibitor of free speech), so free speech can supposedly flourish. This doesn’t make sense, since their actual objective is to normalize the arbitrary measuring and scoring of all speech, so speech that they deem as having contempt doesn’t even make it into the national political and public sphere.
According to their website, they are “working with developers to create AI tools that journalists can use to score political speech, browser extensions that people can use to keep contempt out of their newsfeeds, and apps that can flag contempt in personal messages before users post them or send them.”
Tools like these actually abridge the right to free speech, and create a path for citizens’ expression to be limited by whoever is in power and sets the rules, like it is in China.
If a progressive regime that believes acknowledging biological facts is akin to violence sets the rules, a low Dignity Index score of 1 could be given to speech that says that there are only two sexes and they’re immutable, and be kept out of the public square.
The Long-Term “Democracy” Agenda of the Dignity.us Policy Council
Not only is it suspicious that the website set up by Biden’s United We Stand Summit, Dignity.us, now goes straight to The Dignity Index, but a closer look into the members of the seemingly bipartisan White House Domestic Policy Council chosen to oversee it reveals they’re not bipartisan at all. Moreover, the several other projects they share with Shriver point to a more insidious long-term agenda besides just weakening free speech laws; an agenda that seeks to use education, election and economic reform to shift America’s system of governance to a Democracy without capitalism or representation under the guise of “civic renewal.”
Three of the Dignity.us members – John Bridgeland, Melody Barnes, and Joseph Grogan – all served on the National Advisory Council of the COVID-Collaborative, co-founded by Timothy Shriver, and CEO John Bridgeland.
Bridgeland has served a major role in all three of Shriver’s non-profit organizations – COVID Collaborative, Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), and UNITE – which all worked in tandem with each other during the pandemic (see how here) to introduce progressive policies in many states. Utah is just one example (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Map showing how COVID-Collaborative, CASEL, and UNITE work together to promote leftist policies and how The Dignity Index and Governor Cox’s “Disagree Better” campaign in Utah, in partnership with Braver Angels, is also linked to this agenda.
COVID-Collaborative partnered with states to market COVID-19 policies and assist with their implementation. Serving as the Board Chair of CASEL, Shriver used his position of influence on the COVID-Collaborative to introduce CASEL’s Social Emotional Learning programs into Utah’s classrooms as the “solution” for struggling mental health. Many “CASEL Select” programs like Second Step were exposed for using manipulative techniques to indoctrinate students with critical race and queer theory, turning them into social justice activists for causes like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ advocacy.
Simultaneously, Utah joined CASEL’s Collaborating States Initiative (which included a Community of Practice with Bridgeland’s CIVIC, LLC) that accelerated the state’s adoption of action civics and DEI-laden service-learning programs. Meanwhile, Ranked Choice Voting policies were promoted through Shriver’s organization UNITE, which is part of the aforementioned New Pluralists network.
The fourth and final team member of the Dignity.us team, Cecilia Munoz, was a senior advisor and former vice president of New America, a Soros-funded organization that promotes blockchain-based pilots for Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) .
Having cities adopt or expand RCV pilots appears to be a major thrust of those connected to this faux “Democracy” Movement, which Utah took the bait and fell for.
Ranked Choice Voting – Eliminating America’s Representative Democracy
23 Utah cities ended up adopting ranked choice voting policies, some of which have since been abandoned because of citizen pushback. Why? Voters found it confusing and complicated. In RCV, voters rank candidates on their ballots by preference – first, second, third choice, and so on. Candidates with the fewest first-preference votes get eliminated, and the votes of the voters who picked the eliminated candidate as their first choice get allocated to the rest of the candidates. This procedure continues until one candidate is seen as having majority support, even though they could have overall been voters’ third choice had the other candidates not been eliminated. This convoluted process ends up reducing voter trust in the results, and it also violates the “one person, one vote” principle of American elections.
It’s no surprise that Shriver’s NGO “UNITE” partners with FairVote, the main lobby behind RCV. According to FairVote, their mission is to see that “all elections in the United States are held with ranked choice voting,” and “winner-take-all congressional elections are replaced with proportional representation.”
Proportional representation is a euphemism for imposing majority rule that justifies gerrymandering and the elimination of the Electoral College, in order to achieve “pure democracy.”
Why the Difference Between a “Democracy” and a Representative “Republic” Matters
“In a republic, laws are made by representatives chosen by the people who must comply with a constitution that specifically protects the rights of the minority from the will of the majority.”
If morality is defined by the majority in a Democracy, without the protection of representatives who swear an oath to uphold the Constitution in their governing, then “imposing conformity, control, coercion, and oppression over those who disagree with their definition of equality, fairness, tolerance, or even love” will be deemed as “protecting democracy.” As America witnessed during the pandemic, “protecting democracy” included calling parents who spoke out at school board meetings against the political indoctrination of students domestic terrorists, and calling any information questioning the validity of COVID-19 policies dis/misinformation. Those people’s right to free speech, though they were targeted, was still protected by the 1st amendment, while in a system of “mob rule”, individuals who don’t agree with the Democracy’s version of morality because of their personal beliefs could be considered an extremist that needs to be silenced, or worse, punished.
In a pure democracy, the leftist masses in California and New York would have more voting power in elections, leaving conservatives who live in “fly-over” states (without a representative in the White House) with much less. That’s why it’s crucial that America functions as a Constitutional Republic with a representative democracy where the diverse perspectives and speech of all its states and the constituents within them have a say in the governance of the nation.
The Better Together America Ecosystem – the “they” behind The “Democracy” Movement
Biden may be out of office now, but the “Democracy” Movement and the various people, organizations and funders like the New Pluralists connected to it have regrouped and created a massive network to carry on their work called the Better Together America Ecosystem. Using the very real problem of the need for civil dialogue between the two major political parties, they’ve been successful in fooling conservatives into having deceptive Delphi sessions led by trained facilitators who know how to use group dynamics and crowd agitator techniques to get participants to compromise on divisive political topics. The participants don’t know that these meetings often have a predetermined outcome that ultimately serves a progressive agenda that they’re being steered toward. States who have invited groups that are a part of the Ecosystem in to create local “civic hubs” have seen policies on the 1st amendment and election policy especially (among other issues) move further and further from their Constitutional protections.
Furthermore, all one has to do is look at the reports and listen to the recordings of the back-channel convenings of the groups in the Better Together America Ecosystem to know that the politics and agenda of the organizations and people connected to it are largely left-leaning, and – in some cases – radically so. From the nasty comments about President Trump and their disappointment of the voters who voted for him to their dislike of capitalism and the pronouns listed in parenthesis after their screen names, there is nary anyone representing conservative values in sight in this “pro-democracy movement of movements.”
It’s truly a trap that conservative states should at least be wary of, lest they might find themselves “disagreeing better” into a very different, totalitarian version of America.
Lisa Logan is host of the YouTube Channel Parents of Patriots and author of the Substack Education Manifesto. You can find her on X at @iamlisalogan.
I THANK GOD FOR MY POLITICAL PERSECUTION!!!