Our nation’s capital was recently under military occupation with security checkpoints, non-scalable fences, and armed National Guardsmen on patrol. Big Tech is silencing conservative views. And calls to ban Fox News are growing.
After four years of collective pearl-clutching over President Donald Trump’s purported love of dictators, Democrats quickly embraced the actual strategies of authoritarian governments. Who knew the left’s obsession with fascism might have been foreshadowing actions of their own?
That D.C. was under near-lockdown wasn’t merely a flex to protect the inauguration of President Joe Biden. It’s more to tell conservatives there is a new power dynamic that Democrats don’t want to relinquish.
After the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol Building, Democrats suddenly adopted an aggressive posture against “domestic terrorists” with calls for investigations, the passage of the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, and a set of new talking points delivered to left-wing national media outlets.
Appearances aside, however, the Democrat Party is not as interested in tackling violence as it is exploiting the siege to consolidate its power. It’s why for the last eight months, these same Democrats ignored, downplayed, and in some egregious cases, encouraged Antifa terrorism that ransacked D.C., Minneapolis, New York, Portland, and Seattle.
Are they operating with a double standard? Of course. And they’ll almost certainly get away with it thanks to a reliably hyper-partisan national media, which often mirrors Democrat talking points. Compare the insulting coverage of “mostly peaceful protests” that destroyed businesses and killed Americans versus “insurrection” coverage.
You won’t find any mainstream voices on the right condoning the violence that took place at the Capitol the day Congress counted the Electoral College votes. The deadly riot by a mob of mostly Trump supporters will be remembered as a stain on our history.
Yet plenty of mainstream Democrats took a more permissive view when confronted with left-wing violence in 2020. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., encouraged “unrest in the streets for as long as there is unrest in our lives.” Then-candidate Kamala Harris raised funds to bail criminal activists out of jail. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., pretended Antifa was a myth. Perhaps those buildings spontaneously combusted?
The inconsistency can be easily explained: Democrats viewed left-wing violence as politically advantageous. The chaos was blamed on “Trump’s America” and Joe Biden was seen as a calming force to bring the country back to normalcy.
After four years promising that Trump’s rhetoric would lead to violence, Democrats finally got their riot. Immediately, they coalesced around a strategy that could keep them in power for generations.
Democrats pushed Big Tech to silence the president, and it did just that — and then some. Suddenly, there was a purge of conservatives from social media. Parler was taken offline.
Newly minted “Squad” member Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., tried to expel congressional Republicans for lawfully objecting to election certification (as Democrats did four years earlier). She blamed those Republicans, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, for the insurrection.
Then with the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, framed by Democrat bill sponsor Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., to address “white supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists,” Democrats set the stage to monitor all conservatives. Some already claim that the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump’s re-election have been radicalized and need deprogramming.
But Democrats claim this is just about ending political violence.
If Democrats were truly interested in tackling political extremism, they’d start with Antifa. These violent radicals organize on Twitter and Facebook — not Parler. They call for the destruction of government institutions and use violence and threats to push lawmakers into policy action. They have a flag and essentially wear a uniform in the form of black bloc. They even proudly self-identify as Antifa.
Antifa is the easiest domestic terrorist group to fight. But Democrats have no interest. This is about power.
During the Trump era, they’ve argued that the country was founded on white supremacy, that every institution suffered from institutionalized racism, and to this day, that there’s been too little progress tackling the scourge of bigotry. The riot at the Capitol was the latest iteration of the hate. Indeed, that a mostly white crowd of rioters wasn’t overwhelmed by a police force was proof of insidious “white privilege.”
If Democrats can get voters to identify conservatism as racist and Republicans as white supremacists, it makes it a lot easier to win elections. Eventually, it would destroy the GOP. Who would want to vote for a party of bigots? Plenty of Democrats believe this to be true, making their strategy morally justifiable.
An easy way to label conservative thought as racist is to keep mainstream Republican viewpoints from being heard. Purging conservatives from social media is a step in that direction. There’s even a serious push to censor conservative cable outlets. Claiming mere coverage of the election challenges was incitement to violence, some are calling for cable companies to drop conservative outlets entirely.
CNN’s Oliver Darcy demanded that “TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories.” He wasn’t talking about CNN, which peddled endlessly bad-faith criticisms of Republicans. Darcy meant FOX News, Newsmax, and OAN.
Over at the Washington Post, media columnist Margaret Sullivan shamefully promoted an advertiser boycott of FOX News. She claims the network is a danger to democracy. She should look in a mirror.
The strategy is audacious, but not as Herculean when you consider Democrats have both a tragedy to exploit and media outlets plus Big Tech offering assistance. Most Americans only catch snippets of news from either the TV networks or social media — both of which are friendly to Democrat positions.
The very institutions you’d expect to call this plan out may be in on it. With that kind of support, no wonder Democrats seem so carefree in their inconsistencies.
