Trump's Krystallnacht
January 12, 2021
ARNOLD Schwarzenegger, of all people, has accused Trump and his supporters of embarking on their very own Kristallnacht last week. Meanwhile, Pelosi has given the Republicans a two-day deadline to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment or she will impeach.
Slate explains that many of the the far-right riff-raff who assaulted the Capitol last week were motivated by the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, and believe Trump is leading the fight against a network of paedophiles, cannibals and Satanists who secretly run the world. Ashli Babbitt, the protester shot dead by police, believed the protests last Wednesday would generate the chiliastic “storm” in which the Unpresident could finally vanquish his enemies and fulfill his sacred mission.
The most baffling thing here is not the belief in the existence of a Deep State made up of evil child abusers, but that Trump - a shallow, pathologically self-serving egomaniac who is less than the sum of his crude appetites - could possibly have taken on the responsibility of defeating it.
There’s a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Twitter et al suspending Trump’s accounts. Egregious though Trump’s opinions are, do we really want all public discourse to be policed by the likes of Dorsey or Zuckerberg?
Those wacky former revolutionary communists at Spiked Online called all this a “woke purge” launched by “the new capitalist oligarchs of Silicon Valley”: “billionaire capitalists voted for by precisely nobody have just silenced a man who is still the democratically elected president of the United States.”
On the other hand, the Huffington Post is reporting that there seem to be active plots to encircle the Capitol again and even assassinate some of Trump’s enemies. A security briefing for members of Congress “underscored the wisdom of Twitter suspending Trump’s account, as well as tens of thousands of accounts associated with the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon”. Social media, it turns out, was being used to “recruit armed extremists”.
And so, the age-old debate about free speech rears its head. Does free speech include the right to incite a riot? What sort of communication, if any, should be forbidden, and who gets to decide? Anyway, someone in the Guardian writes that banning Trump from Twitter “is a little like banning E coli from your large intestine”.
