President Donald Trump is on his way to becoming the most cancelled man in America.
On Friday, Twitter pulled the plug on the president’s account in a move that was a long time coming after a horde of Trump supporters rampaged about the U.S. Capitol in protest of the Electoral College certification. The move followed Facebook and Instagram doing the same on Thursday, sparking a leftist purge of online voices dissenting from the dystopian world order of big tech oligarchs ruling from Silicon Valley.
Google, Snapchat, Spotify, Shopify, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitch have each now banned or restricted an outgoing president now facing not only corporate banishment from the online public square but a second impeachment by Democrats seeking to bar the outgoing commander-in-chief from ever holding office again. The president’s exile, however, coming from top government officials and big corporate exposes not only the façade of Democrats’ call for unity but a deep obliviousness to the underlying issues that sparked the Capitol unrest.
Below is one of the final posts retweeted by Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who served 14 years in the military and was shot to death while attacking the Capitol building.
“People I trust in Washington DC … 1) President Trump – the end,” the post reads.
I’ll say this one more time in 2020 …
People I trust in Washington DC …
1) President Trump
– the end
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) December 31, 2020
While video of Babbitt’s shooting calls into question the officer’s use of a deadly weapon, her presence at the Capitol can’t be excused. Nor could any other person’s. Americans were killed in the attack, dozens others were injured. The imagery of a riotous mob overwhelming the Capitol put another scar on a fractured country.
Incredible pic by @Reuters pic.twitter.com/yFo5B8XaIX
— Laura Bicker (@BBCLBicker) January 6, 2021
Condemning the rioters and understanding their presence, however, are not mutually exclusive. Each are equally important.
Babbitt’s endorsement of the post above, along with the more than 22,000 others who liked it, is emblematic of the worldview shared by millions as institutional leaders have failed them, lied to them, and even mocked them for decades.
As my colleague, Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky, points out, while their views of mistrust might be misguided, they’re hard to blame, “because the corporate media has lied to them about the big stuff time and time and time again. So have their elected officials. So have scientific institutions and leaders in academia.”
They’ve watched their mayors and governors violate their own regulations for the sake of leisure or personal convenience or politics, crippling business and workers while they eat crabs. They then watched the media’s nakedly unbalanced coverage of it all, wild bias from bonus-pocketing journalists purporting to be arbiters of fact and undisputed occupants of the moral high ground.
Their lives, like all of our lives, have been upended in just over a decade by products tech oligarchs promised would make us happier. Those same billionaires now join the chorus of elites who treat them as ‘irredeemables’ and ‘deplorables’ because they disagree with full-throated progressivism.
So when Trump stood down the street from the Capitol and blasted the election being certified in the Democrats’ favor as an illegitimate process, his thousands of followers believed him, ransacked the Capitol, and gave leftists ammunition to declare them “deplorable.”
Last week’s unrest has now been capitalized on by Democrats and their allies in big media and big tech to implement a corporate-government crackdown that was absent in the aftermath of routine riots last year from far-left militants. The onslaught has offered Democrats the political momentum to achieve the top policy item of their Trump-era agenda: the president’s impeachment, even after he’s out of office.
Impeachment, however, only serves to inflame divisions by rooting out a man who was always a symptom of deep problems that promise to persist even long after his departure. Worse, Trump’s post-presidential impeachment reinforces the convictions of the president’s supporters who believe Trump is the only figure they could trust. That’s what led them to riot in the first place.
