On Friday, the president and first lady meandered through a Valentine display Jill Biden designed to decorate the front lawn of the White House. With Champ, Major, and a handful of media lap dogs in tow, the Bidens nodded with approval at the large white, red, and pink heart-shaped cut-outs adorned with trite truisms: “unity,” “healing,” “love,” and “compassion.”
But Democrat politicians don’t want healing, love, or compassion. They want power. If successful and long-lasting, the policies they push, and corporate media and Big Tech’s complicity in the leftward lurch of our country, will ensure America is never united again.
Last week’s photo-op continued the unity theme Democrats have been peddling since their primary season began in 2019. After Biden secured the nomination and ran on a “character counts” platform, the press continued to play along, ignoring both Biden’s scandals and his own bullying behavior.
Biden’s inaugural address proclaimed the unity theme as well, before the president began to divide the nation with the flick of his pen, signing a flurry of executive orders that pitted Americans against each other.
Biden’s reversal of the Mexico City policy was a painful attack on pro-life Americans, forcing them to fund international abortion providers with their tax dollars. Halting the Keystone XL Pipeline promises to decimate many of this country’s blue-collar oil workers. And by discontinuing the border wall and instituting a 100-day freeze on deportations, Biden has pitted border states against the federal government, as southern states fight to safeguard American citizens and their fiscal health.
Unity does not mean abandoning policy priorities, Biden’s defenders counter. No, it is “more of a change in culture, not splitting the difference on policy plans. . . .The two sides will still wage vigorous battles over ideas, so this argument goes, but they should be debates of good will rather than search-and-destroy operations.” This definition of unity, however, fares no better: Biden and his allies don’t want debate, and they don’t possess goodwill.
Proof of the latter permeated the 2020 campaign, with Biden regularly repeating the lie that then-President Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.” Then, just two weeks before his inauguration, “Biden smeared Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas as Nazis.” And in abolishing the 1776 Commission and reversing Trump’s ban on critical race theory “training,” President Biden further displayed bad faith by branding the former president’s policies as “harmful,” “offensive,” and “counterfactual.”
Our country can survive the lack of goodwill in politics, as except for a faction of extremists, Americans love their neighbors, no matter their political persuasion. What our country cannot survive, however, is a silencing of debate—whether it be at the hands of the government or monopolistic powers aligned with the ruling class.
So great is the need for a full airing of competing ideas to our republic that the Founding Fathers placed the freedom of speech, of the press, and the right to petition the government first among the individual liberties in the Bill of Rights. But what the Constitution forbids the government from doing, corporate America is doing on behalf of Democrats.
Corporate media began the march to a totalitarian vetting of viewpoints by slanting the news and spinning narratives. What began as a mere bias in reporting, however, became a pure propaganda project when Trump entered the scene, first with the years-long peddling of the Russia-collusion hoax and then with big tech helping bury the Hunter Biden scandal.
Legacy media proved powerless to silence new media outlets and citizen-reporters. And with Twitter, Trump and other conservative politicians bypassed the filter of the press entirely.
But then came the purge. First, they came for Trump, followed by his high-profile supporters. Next, came the shuttering of Parler. On a smaller, but more personal scale, private citizens have seen the same: Support conservative causes, and face ostracization and unemployment.
The silencing of dissent will only get worse, with Big Tech and corporate media emboldened with every success and with the apparent helplessness of the right to respond. And really, what is the response? Antitrust challenges to the monopolistic power exercised by Google and Amazon? Removal of Twitter and Facebook’s legal immunity? Yet without the support of the Biden administration, neither approach has much chance.
Stifling debate won’t change minds, however. And conservatives will not capitulate. They will either continue to speak in whatever public sphere they can, or they will remain silent publicly, but band together to work, pray, learn, play, and live, free within their enclaves to profess their traditional values.
All the heart-shaped unity placards cannot change that a republic cannot long survive this way.
