Bad insurrectionists, sure.
But why are they actually that angry?
Betrayal. Disenfranchisement. Poverty with iPhones and other manifestations of gross income inequality.
The mob, composed of workers and those ejected from the middle class, will continue to be betrayed, and their rage will only grow. Violent responses will grow in proportion, until they are something like a new normal.
This is the first of many reasons why de-platforming Trump was a bad idea. Forcing raging extremists underground will only built their pressure, which will still have to be released somehow, and more explosively.
Also remember that the first organization the tech companies censored was called Wikileaks, and for the same reason. Neither was a threat to ‘democracy’ (as if this were still a democracy). Both were a threat to established oligarchic power.
Also remember that we know nothing about the opaque overlords of big tech, except that they know absolutely everything about us.
Also remember that they are oligarchic power, and are bonded into the power architecture through the mechanism of the Democratic party.
Since the middle of the last decade, the Democratic party has consistently refused to acknowledge the rupturing of social ties and structures caused by neoliberalism and austerity and offshoring and the whole evil ball of thick post-historical wax we attempt to breathe through in this fallen new american world.
Until the ruling elites come to terms with this white christian fascist trumpy rage and the fact that they caused it themselves, things will get worse and worse.
If you should tell people that turning off the crazy president’s twitter is a dangerous and stupid idea, you may find yourself labeled a defender of fascists.
Amazon has a 600 billion dollar contract with the CIA, and big tech is completely integrated into the security and surveillance state.
Censorship of ‘social media’ will continue to foment tensions and divisions, ripping the social fabric still worse and worse until it disintegrates totally.
Neo-liberals cheer the censorship, and will continue to do so when it is turned around and pointed at dissenters to the left of them too. The existing evidence for this is what they did to Julian Assange, even if you only count ignoring what’s happened to him (as the liberal media has done), much less those like Clinton, Obama, and Biden who actively persecute him.
Meanwhile they give us Identity Politics, which isn’t politics, having nothing to do with the class struggle, economic justice, or economic power at all.
At this point it becomes necessary to tell you that these points are being brought to you by Chris Hedges as he is being interviewed by Jimmy Dore, because he mentions Taibbi and Greenwald, along with himself and his interviewer, as being the people most hated by neolibs because they are speaking truth to power and people are listening.
The for-profit companies of Silicon Valley are censoring precisely because of their integration into neoliberal power, and they have and will happily censor anyone who even marginally threatens that power or their business model or the politicians they’ve bought and paid for.
What I’ve done above is to paraphrase the first nine minutes of a 45-minute video. I’ll cut the point-by-point there. A few other scattered points follow.
The rage of the insurrectionists was ugly and wrong and rooted in stupidity, but that does not mean it was not legitimate.
The goal of for-profit health care companies is not health care, it’s profit. Not-for-profit health care is a heresy against capitalism. M4A is unthinkably radical to power in America, even though it is the common sense norm in every other functional country in the world.
The American Left may not have been particularly healthy since FDR, but it didn’t freeze to death until the Clinton administration.
The problem with politicians is that if they actually won’t sell out, they are destroyed. (As a side note, I think this phenomenon extends well beyond the limits of the political class in this country.)
Liberals are more hated than conservatives among the white working class because in addition to being vicious betrayers of the class struggle, they’re spineless and weak too. Hatred toward neo-liberals isn’t a problem. The problem is that it evolves into hatred for the democratic and enlightenment values they claim to embrace, like education and multiculturalism. And rejecting those is what leads to fascism.
On a related note, Democrats are hated more than Republicans because there used to be a time when they actually did stand up for the working class, and so their betrayal is felt more deeply. Again, this all went deliberately and definitively to hell under Clinton, with NAFTA, the death of unions and the like. (At the same time Biden was ramming through the infamous Omnibus Crime Bill and locking up more and more non-violent poor people of all colors.)
Biden’s administration will repeat history just like the guy before Hitler in Germany, 1932. What we get after that will of course be far worse, because under Uncle Joe the betrayals will go on as always, and the pressures of rage will continue to become more and more extremist.
Eventually there will be an insurrection that is worthy of the name.
By these measures Trump wasn’t anything close to being a fascist–he had no ideology but money–although the void in his ideology was partly filled by a Mike Pence-inspired brand of Christian fascist thinking.
Biden and the Dems (the party of war, the party of Wall Street), in any other functional country in the world, would be considered right-wing.
Politics is a game of fear. The only way the people will ever get any demand met is when the politicians begin to fear them. (Even Roosevelt only managed to get anything done by telling the capitalists ‘give up a little now, or they’re going to come after you for everything later’.)
The revered founders of America were white slaveholder elites and fairly well terrified of actual direct democracy. Every single truly democratic advance since their nominal revolution, from the Abolitionists to the Suffragettes to the Labor Movement to Civil Rights, have bought their advances with spilled blood and many deaths. Real change will never come through the Democratic Party, and going along with them will only ensure a future of corporate totalitarianism.
Finally.
“If the destruction of the natural world isn’t making us happy …
Why are we doing it?”
More about that subject on the morrow.