The harsh red atmospherics perfectly complemented Biden’s attempt to portray ex-President Donald Trump and Republicans as the Antichrist waiting to crucify American democracy. But the most important takeaway from the speech is the supreme hypocrisy of Biden’s Supreme Leader Democracy.

Biden, speaking from Philadelphia, invoked the Declaration of Independence to sanctify his spiel. But he omitted quoting the line most relevant today from the author of that declaration. “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” Thomas Jefferson warned in 1784.

Biden invoked the “rule of law” five times, notwithstanding his 20 months of dictatorial decrees. Law professor Jonathan Turley observed, “President Biden has arguably the worst record of losses in [federal court] the first two years of any recent presidential administration.” One year ago, Biden went prime-time for his COVID vaccine-mandate speech — an illegal decree to inject more than 80 million private employees that got smashed by the Supreme Court. Biden dictated the moratorium on evicting renters would continue, but the Supreme Court overruled him, scoffing at the administration’s attempt to justify the edict by an old law dealing with “fumigation and pest extermination.”

According to Team Biden, the president is entitled to seize almost boundless power merely by invoking the name of an irrelevant law. Biden decreed last week that taxpayers will be forced to cover the cost of up to a trillion dollars in student loans that he magnanimously decided to “forgive.” Biden justified the bailout by citing the HEROES Act of 2003 — a law passed to enable the education secretary to help soldiers and their family members during the war on terror. Lawsuits will challenge Biden’s debt shenanigans, but the giveaway could buy millions of votes for Democrats in the midterm elections.

Biden boasted that “today, COVID no longer controls our lives.” But it was politicians and their shutdown orders that controlled lives, not the virus. Biden vigorously endorsed lockdowns and school shutdowns, which were perpetuated after he took office to placate teachers unions (despite his promise to reopen schools within 100 days). The revelations this week of catastrophic learning losses confirm the damage that Team Biden and its allies inflicted on tens of millions of children.

In his litany of Republican sins Thursday, Biden huffed, “Can you believe it? — FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens.” But there’s a reason most Americans view the FBI as “Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.” Are FBI agents “doing their jobs as directed” when they hound and vilify parents who protested at school-board meetings? Biden personally thanked the head of the National School Boards Association for sending the inflammatory letter to the White House that provided a pretext for the FBI vendetta. The FBI “has labeled at least dozens of investigations into parents” with a terrorist-threat tag, according to House Republicans. And we are still learning about the FBI’s role in suppressing damning evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.

Biden neglected to mention Thursday that he is censor-in-chief. Team Biden browbeat Twitter to censor specific individuals (such as Alex Berenson) and pressured Facebook to shut down a parody account of COVID czar Anthony Fauci. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is suing the feds, declared that the lawsuit’s disclosures “clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social-media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech.”

Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board would have been a Ministry of Truth on steroids, but it was shut down after a nationwide backlash against the scheme.

On Thursday night, Biden endlessly denounced “extremism” and “extremists.” But he didn’t confide to listeners that he considered almost half of all Americans to be “extremists.”

A few hours before Biden’s speech, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, “When you are not with where majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” Is this wacko definition of extremism designed to vilify anyone who doubts Biden will save America’s soul? (Thursday night’s speech had a New Age title, “The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.”)

One week after denouncing Republicans for “semi-fascism,” Biden called for everyone to “unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy.” But Biden is offering us the banana-republic version of Democracy. Biden believes that thanks to 43,000 votes in three swing states in the 2020 election, he is entitled to unlimited power to dictate how Americans must live.

Biden’s entire presidency is a mockery of this nation’s founding principles. In 1798, Thomas Jefferson warned, “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.” If a president refuses to be bound by the Constitution, he is behaving like a dictator.

James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.