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© Getty Images/Lance Larson"Old Glory"
Both Democrats and Republicans think America is disintegrating. But the newspeak narrative says that Trump and his supporters must be cleansed from the nation before it can heal. This totalitarian mindset could be the US' undoing.

A recent Axios-Ipsos poll suggests that 79 percent of Americans believe that the nation is disintegrating. Axios AM reporter, Mike Allen writes:
"The question, asked Tuesday and Wednesday, reflects the collision of crises besetting the country — the backdrop of a pandemic, recession, decoupling of red/blue America, and racial injustice and the immediacy of the Capitol insurrection, followed by Impeachment II."
But the question of whether the US is now a failed national project is meant to put a stake into the heart of the Donald Trump presidency and to destroy, entirely, the movement he mobilized. The purpose of the poll is to leave no doubt in the minds of readers that Trump is responsible for these national crises and must be removed from office, and never allowed to run again. The objective is to separate Trump and his supporters, to purge both from the public square, and likewise to leave no alternative to the ruling Democratic-RINO, Big Tech, mainstream media, corporate-state hegemon that threatens to impose its technologically enforced totalitarian rule.

'Let the purges begin'

Twitter has banned the sitting president from its platform indefinitely. Facebook and Instagram have banished Trump until at least after Joe Biden's inauguration. After Twitter began cancelling Trump followers, Amazon Web Services, Apple Store, and Google Play cancelled an entire corporation, Twitter competitor Parler. Other social media platforms could face a similar fate at the hands of the leftist authoritarian Big Tech cartel.

Tens of thousands, if not millions, of Trump supporters have either been purged from mainstream social media platforms or have fled in protest. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has recently promised more censorship and purges. Even the libertarian leader of an earlier populist movement, Ron Paul, has faced a Facebook ban (although this was subsequently claimed to be "an error"). Guilt by association seems to the rule, no matter how distant or strained the association.

The purges extend well beyond social media. Trump has been cancelled by former business associates, including by one of his former financiers, Deutsche Bank. Blacklists of Trump supporters are being compiled. Congress members have called for the resignation of senators and House members who questioned the election results. If they refuse to resign, say the totalitarian wannabes about to seize complete control, they should be removed from office. ABC News contributor Rick Klein called for the "cleansing" of Trump supporters from the political landscape in a now-deleted tweet.

The Bill of Don'ts

In their efforts to expunge the Trump movement from memory let alone existence, these neo-Stalinists are hellbent on nullifying constitutionally guaranteed rights - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to bear arms are under assault.

In place of the Bill of Rights, they would impose a Bill of Don'ts:
- Don't say what we don't want to hear.
- Don't gather where we don't allow, especially if you are a 'deplorable'.
- Don't bother petitioning for grievances, because we don't care.
- Don't own weapons.
- Don't defend yourself when you or your property are attacked, even as the police are defunded.
- Don't tell us about your right to privacy because our right to surveil you supersedes it.
- Don't tell us you have the right to confront the witnesses aligned against you, or see the evidence alleged against you, or to present evidence and witnesses in your own defense. That's your white privilege speaking, and we will not tolerate hate speech.
- Don't expect us to be bound by due process or the rule of law. Feelings and desired outcomes trump facts and rules, both of which are tools of oppression, relics of the fascist patriarchy.
- Don't object, or we will cancel you entirely from these Disunited States of Woketopia.
And first and foremost, don't dare have the temerity to question election results that have handed us uncontested power.

Only authoritarians sanction this state of affairs. The harm they will do, as they neglect and inflict further pain on the Republic, will be immeasurable. The nation is failing, not merely because it is divided, but because a contingent has rejected its foundational principles. That contingent is now in control.

The new underground

Pushing the Trump-inspired populist movement underground may only cause it to resort to more drastic measures. As the leftist libertarian reporter Glenn Greenwald observes:
"these people know they are scorned and looked down upon... and the more you humiliate and make them feel powerless, the more you take away their ability to organize and express that rage, it's gonna find an outlet in more destructive ways."
As a former professor at a top-ranking university, I favored a Trump re-election, not because I support Trump so much as abhor what the opposition represents and is proving itself to be. In response to the social media threat to expression, I have inaugurated a new group on Telegram called 'Thought Criminals'. There, fellow 'thought deviationists' like me are able to express views that are effectively proscribed on mainstream social media platforms. No one among us advocates violence or the overthrow of the government. None of us is 'racist'. We advocate only the rights enshrined in the US Constitution.

But some groups, no doubt, are intent on violence. Yet the violent extremists consist mostly of Antifa and related 'activists', who will unfortunately trick Trump supporters into another error during the inauguration, like some appeared to do when involved in the Capitol siege. It's not as if violent extremists among the Trump base were always there, ready to pounce on any opportunity to express their "racist," "white nationalist" views.

Rather, as the rising party has already demonstrated, these people stand to lose the most under a Biden-Harris regime, whose Big Tech and mainstream media allies act as governmental enforcement apparatuses. Trump supporters have been hated and demonized simply for wanting to live without being reprimanded and punished for their whiteness, their middle-Americanness, or their values. They face an anti-white, anti-native, anti-middle-America extremism that is set to silence and crush them into submission.

These and others will form a new underground under the prevailing ideological and political hegemony. This banishment of millions, and not Trump, is why the nation will fall apart, if indeed it does.
About the Author:
Michael Rectenwald is an author of 11 books, including the most recent, Thought Criminal. He was Professor of Liberal Arts at NYU from 2008 through 2019. Follow him on Twitter @TheAntiPCProf