Not just Trump, but his backers in the Republican Party and the everyday “deplorables” who post favorably about him must be destroyed, the narrative managers have decreed. Demanding what sounds for all the world like a Stalinist purge, they have raised a cry of “Never Again” – as if the Trump administration’s crimes were any worse than those of his predecessors. The aim of the anti-Trump #Resistance has shifted from removing him from office to ensuring all traces of the ideas he brought into mainstream discourse be destroyed forever, full stop.
Salting the earth
Given that half the electorate voted for him – twice – this is no less than a declaration of civil war, and its proponents are leaving little doubt as to their intentions. The Intercept, recently exposed by co-founder Glenn Greenwald as little more than a pro-Biden information-laundering facility, declared that, with Trump, “all of America faced a great historical test, and almost all of America failed completely.” Truly, “almost all of America” must be punished.
Angelo Carusone of liberal news watchdog Media Matters literally declared war on Fox News and other conservative news organizations last week, complaining the Right had somehow “cheated” its way into dominating news shares on Facebook and accusing Fox of leading Americans astray. Replies were dominated by calls to criminalize sharing “fake news.” Rather than look inward and understand how elitist media types have utterly alienated the majority of Americans, Carusone and his employer – along with many others – have continued their four-year litany of attacking conservatives (and disaffected liberals) for rejecting the thin political gruel served up by the journalistic establishment.
Probably as far from a real “truth and reconciliation commission” as it’s possible to get, the Trump Accountability Project embodies the confluence of these toxic currents. Its light-on-content but heavy-on-Orwellian-signaling website demands Americans “never forget those who furthered the Trump agenda,” while hinting that those who worked in the Trump administration and helped to elect him (whether with their money, their organizations, or their votes) will never work in this town again. Or any other town, for that matter. Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) has similarly called on her fans to archive Trump supporters’ tweets in case of deletion.
Setting up civil war
This profoundly undemocratic drive to punish wrongthink with a reputational death penalty is no snap emotional reaction to election season bitterness, either. It’s actually been in the works for a while, as an MSNBC clip from August 2019 that recently resurfaced makes clear. In the segment, the Washington Post’s neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that “It’s not only that Trump has to lose, his enablers have to lose.” Rubin urges her comrades to “collectively burn down the Republican Party” as her fellow panelists nod in agreement.
While Rubin’s defenders might claim she meant that metaphorically, such bloody-mindedness presages the Trump Accountability Project and its ilk uncannily. With the rise of doxxing-as-journalism as practiced by the likes of NBC’s star “disinformation reporter” Brandy Zadrozny, merely being a Trump supporter is now enough of a crime to merit “outing” as a private citizen, which can and often does lead to job losses, social ostracism, and even death threats.
Liberals who don’t toe the establishment line but remain quiet while conservatives are attacked in this manner are signing their own death warrant, as history has shown that totalitarian regimes who vanquish one “enemy” invariably seek another. Already, traditionally liberal ideas like support for free speech, opposition to war, and speaking out against the weaponization of dogmatic “science” to ram through egregious social control measures are being declared Trumpian, their proponents – no matter how far left – declared persona non grata.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Rubin slimed the pro-Trump wing of the Republicans as “not what the country wants or what it needs.” However, she and her cronies actually have no idea what the country wants – and have always been heinously wrong on what it needs. Not only were they wrong again about the “blue wave” that failed to materialize in 2020 – Biden’s victory is still contested, and down-ballot races largely favored Republicans – but even four years after Trump’s election they don’t understand the forces that led to it.
Far from an upsurge in “white nationalism” that somehow infected black and Hispanic voters as much as white, voters who picked Trump in 2016 were voting against the smug elitism of the media establishment as embodied by Media Matters and WaPo, which Democrat Hillary Clinton famously channeled by denouncing the “basket of deplorables” supposedly supporting the then-candidate. Voters were weary of the sick fantasy of “humanitarian interventionism,” which lured their sons and even daughters off to war with the promise of free college tuition and sent back shells of their former selves – assuming they came back alive at all. And they were tired of the mirage of economic recovery that followed the 2008 crash, years in which the stock market soared, the rich got richer, and the poor stayed broke.
Human beings can’t eat lies, and even if establishment propagandists were good at their jobs and spun stories that uplifted instead of lambasting, giving the people something to believe in instead of something to point fingers at, the US would ultimately hit a wall as constant money-printing with no assets to back it up is not sustainable. The system is headed for a massive, ugly collapse, but the establishment isn’t going down without a fight. The more they can get Americans to attack one another, the fewer pitchforks they have to fend off when the masses finally realize who’s really responsible for their suffering. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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