“Elections have consequences,” said Barack Obama early in his term in a controversial case. Surely he himself did not think at the time that one day his words would haunt him in an ominous way like today. Just as other actors in Washington’s elite could not have wished for a situation close to civil war in the US capital with the occupation of the Capitol. A few years ago, even the majority of Democrats might be backing away from the techies trying to silence their most powerful political opponent and their entire political movement by launching a coordinated attack. But this is the case today, and we are missing the protests of the democratic-minded elites and Hollywood actors and narrators. What happened to the struggle for freedom of expression and opinion?
Soon after the November 3 election, it became clear that a large portion of American society, including the vast majority of Republican voters, was not prepared to consider the elections legitimate. Dec The survey More than three-quarters of Americans on the right, 10 percent of Democrats and half (!) Unattached voters believed the elections were not free and fair. Today we can say that after days of counting votes and weeks of legal tugging, the official result of a poorly organized and far-fetched election is that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump with 81 million citizens and 306 voters, 74 million votes and 232. He won the electoral vote. .
The Washington elite and the mainstream press quickly realized that such a level of distrust of the electorate posed a serious challenge and could tarnish Joe Biden’s presidency in the long run. The prudent strategy in such circumstances was to acknowledge that the holding of elections did not live up to legitimate expectations, that objections and concerns were taken seriously and that all major complaints were investigated thoroughly and transparently. Thus, some skeptics could have been convinced that the will of the people would eventually prevail. This is not what happened. “The November 3 elections were the cleanest elections in American history,” said the Washington bureaucratic election clean-up organization. The mainstream press immediately attempted to stigmatize anyone who spoke out about the abuse, and protests that may have appeared well-founded were silenced. With this position, which was completely at odds with reality, all that was achieved was that more and more Americans were becoming distrustful and angry.
Among other reasons, this could have led to what happened on January 6th. On this day, the US Congress in a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate debated verifying the final result of the electorate. So this was the last time to change the election results. Donald Trump called his supporters to the capital and a large crowd gathered in Washington, D.C. The president called on his supporters to march in front of the Capitol and press lawmakers to stop sanctioning the elections that he believes were deceived. As the protesters reached the front of the HTS building, anger erupted: a small, aggressive group stormed the building and occupied it for a short time. After the National Guard had restored order, Congress resumed the session, at the end of which Joe Biden was approved. The riots claimed 5 lives.
So with the chain of events sparking outrage, Trump supporters got nothing. Moreover, anti-Washington technologists and the incumbent president have used the occupation of the Capitol to launch a devastating counterattack against Donald Trump and his movement. Following the demonstration, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube blocked the president from accessing his personal files, depriving him of the opportunity to speak directly to his followers. Twitter went above and beyond and cleaned tens of thousands of conservative users from its system during its clean-up days.
However, they did not stop there, and in parallel with the action against Trump and his henchmen, an attack was launched against the increasingly popular Parler in America. Parler is a social network that can be described as an uncensored version of Twitter. When it became apparent during the election campaign that Facebook and Twitter were playing against Trump’s chances, the number of Parler users began to explode as many right-wing users fled here to escape censorship. To meet this challenge, technologists had to take action. Citing that Parler does not oversee the posts carefully enough, Google and Apple have banned the social network from their app stores and deprived Amazon of their web hosting. Hence, as these lines are written, Parler is completely inaccessible. The Conservatives have nowhere to run to.
Anyone who might doubt what the new authority will do with Trump’s 74 million voters got the answer: They will be deprived of online platforms where they can stay in touch, share ideas and organize. This means complete censorship, institutional silencing of a movement that came close to winning an election by achieving the second best result ever and receiving nearly ten million more votes than it was four years ago.
If that wasn’t enough, the Washington elite is threatening the president with yet another constitutional litigation process. Due to time constraints, the process cannot end before Trump’s term ends, but that is not the goal. If the Senate votes, as an accessory to impeachment, the convicted politician may be barred from holding elected office for life. The goal, then, is to make Trump’s re-nomination in 2024 legally impossible as well, depriving his voters of hope for revenge against a fair political battle in the upcoming elections for the defeat they suffered earlier.
This is, of course, a useless strategy. There is no example of a similarly strong, organized, dynamic, and united political movement that represents half of the country being suppressed anywhere in the world in the long term. This seems almost impossible in the United States, where people have become accustomed to adopting their political views boldly. Not to mention that the question arises: Is it possible to talk about American democracy at all now while they are trying to close half of the country and deny their symbolic political leader the opportunity to participate in politics?
