2021: The Year of the Ruling Class’ Crackdown on Dissent
Ben Weingarten, Newsweek, January 3, 2022
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The year 2021 closes as the year of the crackdown, when the Ruling Class weaponized its powers to crush dissenters from its Wokeist-Scientist orthodoxy in arguably the most far-reaching, brazen and lawless assault on Americans by the state and its private-sector adjuncts in our nation’s history.
This was the year that the campus became the country. Those engaging in speech that ran afoul of the Ruling Class’ party line were treated as physical dangers to the homeland, demanding the full force of the public and private sectors to deter, punish and subdue them.
Every free-thinking individual became a potential Donald Trump, liable to be ostracized, harassed and punished for daring to cross the regime in a society-wide Russiagate.
January 6, for which the scope of the Ruling Class’ own role is still unfolding, served as the bridge from Trump to his tens of millions of supporters that the conquering Ruling Class trod over, as foretold in its wake.
A national strategy for countering “domestic terrorism,” associated homeland security threat bulletins and official DOJ/FBI policy directives made crushing dissent an official state objective.
Civil society’s commanding heights worked hand in glove with the regime, for it is part and parcel of it. Censorship, algorithmic suppression, deplatforming, cancelation, social media mobs, sackings, subpoenas, show trials, surveillance—these became part of the daily drumbeat, desensitizing us to what we would usually recognize as both abnormal and un-American.
Periodic purges of social media accounts now look quaint. Today, everyday Americans may not only easily lose their ability to communicate in the digital public square, but also to bank, to work or to raise a family in peace should they engage in an ever-shifting list of thoughtcrimes—or even refuse to get a jab of an experimental drug.
Sometimes, the thoughtcrimes themselves became legal, demonstrating the absurdity of it all, as the dizzying deluge of flip-flops and goalpost-shifts on everything from the lab leak theory of COVID origin to the efficacy of masking to isolation periods and hospitalization data reflect.
This jihad, often running under the banner of “counter-terror,” comes from the very cohort currently shrieking about how “democracy” hangs by a thread if Republicans win in 2022 and, gasp, 2024—wins that would be direct rebukes of the Ruling Class’ anti-democratic, tyrannical acts, and which the Ruling Class now seeks to pre-delegitimize.
There were three subjects above all others that Americans could not broach without facing the regime’s wrath: The integrity of the 2020 election; the draconian, unscientific and self-evidently punitive Chinese coronavirus policies and proclamations; and indoctrination in critical race theory—racial Marxism—in schools.
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Question the integrity of the first essentially un-auditable mass mail-in election in American history, which the Ruling Class proudly sought to rig—ahem, “fortify“—in which state authorities openly flouted election laws and in which all manner of irregularities ensued, and you question the legitimacy of the regime’s rule. Worse, you could be an “armed insurrectionist”—notwithstanding that of the more than 700 charged so-called January 6 “insurrectionists,” none were carrying firearms in the Capitol and none are being prosecuted for “insurrection.”
Question the Chinese coronavirus policies and proclamations and you threaten the authorities’ ability to usurp maximum control over our lives {snip}
Question Critical Race Theory and you challenge the regime’s ideology. Worse, you could become not only a racist (by rejecting race essentialism), but by daring to make your voice heard about what you believe your children ought to be taught in the schools you pay for, you might even be a domestic terrorist.
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By treating the January 6 U.S. Capitol breach as somehow equivalent to the flying of planes into the World Trade Center, the Ruling Class makes the infinitesimal number of Americans who acted pathetically for several hours on a single day into al-Qaeda—and tens of millions of Trump supporters into would-be co-conspirators.
Rendering their political opponents terrorists—while, during the summer of 2020, they had cheered on the destruction of cities and the anti-police movement that has now resulted in record violent crime—was necessary to justify their own terror as they sought to usurp maximum power.
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