State governments run by both parties suppressed votes as well, like with the illegal purging of voter rolls in New York. Massive exit poll discrepancies in Clinton’s favor mysteriously appeared in numerous states, though a refusal to conduct exit polls in many of the contests meant we’ll never know exactly how many of these incidents occurred.
When Sanders supporters spoke out about their disenfranchisement, they were attacked by the corporate media. When WikiLeaks revealed the DNC’s tactics, the media fixated on a dubious Russian DNC hacking theory and Twitter suppressedmany tweets relating to the leak. The valiant attempts to nominate Sanders at the Democratic National Convention were crushed by military containment of protests, the banning of perceived dissenters within the convention hall, and casual displaysof anti-semitic imagery at convention gift shops to show Sanders he wasn’t welcome. And so the superdelegates, largely paid off by the Clinton campaign, authorized an expansive and elaborate coup that would result in the election of a proto-fascist. Yet through the power of a newly mobilized and engaged population, this coup was rendered meaningless.
With the visceral collapse of our traditional institutions that Donald Trump’s election represented, democracy is being revived through popular resistance. Alternative media has in many ways replaced the old corporate propaganda outlets. Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America are at their strongest in recent history. Politicians representing an end to corporate capitalism are gaining power around the world. Protest efforts like the Standing Rock pipeline opposition-distinguished from efforts like the Trump protests in that police don’t tolerate them-have disrupted corporate power.
As the discrediting of the ruling oligarchs’ ideology creates greater and greater rebellion, elites are trying to silence dissent. This month a former FBI agent testifiedto the senate that tech companies must further attack alternative news, saying, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”
RT America has been forced by the Justice Department to register as a foreign agency under threat of its top directors being arrested, making the network easier to stigmatize and suppress. Reports now constantly surface of dissenting journalists being censored by Google, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter. Alternative news sites like Alternet and World Socialist Website have had their viewership declinedramatically from Google’s search algorithm manipulations. The European Union is constructing a center for censoring “fake news,” an extension of the state agency set up in the U.S. last year for fighting “misinformation.”
History has shown that as regimes become threatened, they violently fight back, and a struggle between ideologies takes place. In this confrontation, the ideology that can’t get support with argument, that has to censor and threaten to stop its opponents, that only communicates through violence and repression, has always been the one that’s lost.
We’re seeing this in the frantic efforts the corporate state routinely takes to hide its glaring hypocrisy and illegitimacy. This week the BBC published footage of the U.S. escorting ISIS fighters out of Raqqa on October 12 of this year. Within 24 hours the American press was filled with headlines reporting not on the BBC’s finding, but on a fabricated charge from the Russian government about the U.S. having helped ISIS. Russia’s charge was based on separate photographs and footage from those of the BBC’s, but anyone who brings up the BBC report can now be falsely conflated with repeating Russian propaganda. And Russia’s having put out such transparently false material-the images they used were screenshots from a computer game-suggests the U.S. had sent spies into Russia’s government to initiate the report. This is how a state acts while struggling to maintain its control.
As the Deep State has weakened, like past failed regimes it’s given way to both the constructive and the reactionary. The reactionaries from our current upending of power are represented in the neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and populist authoritarian movements that have been rising around the world in recent years. Those drawn to these movements, like the neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin, are often inconsistent in their views because the ideology isn’t what’s attracted them. It’s the emotional satisfaction that reactionary politics provides, the catharsis of fighting an uncaring power structure through unfocused hate and violence. We need to fight these symptoms of a despotic society as much as we need to fight the disease.
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