The left's deprogramming agenda

 Victor Davis Hanson:

Riotous rogue Trump supporters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were properly and widely condemned by conservatives. They were somewhat reminiscent of the mobs of fanatic leftists and union members that a decade ago stormed the Wisconsin state capitol at Madison, or the unpunished hundreds of rioters who created havoc on Washington, D.C. streets during the Trump 2016 inauguration. We expect the Capitol stormers will be punished, and not in the lax fashion of the latter two groups that were not.

Within a few days, the talking points were finalized that all of Donald Trump’s supporters deserved blame for the violence. That riot, the Trump defeat, and the loss of the Senate have greenlighted left-wing talk of “deprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” “re-educating,” and “reprogramming” half the country to ensure they think correctly and act properly from now on—the exact methodology of such brain rinsing apparently to be announced later.

So we are beginning a great reprogramming of America. The construction of Trump and all of his supporters as abettors, terrorists, seditionists, and traitors is certainly proving useful. After the Capitol conundrum, we have seen over the past two weeks a coordinated and synchronized effort by Amazon, Twitter, and Google to destroy Parler, a small conservative-friendly rival to their social media and internet monopolies. More of such humanitarian taking care of business will follow—all as preemption for the most leftwing agenda in a half-century now rolling out.

Silicon Valley’s continued use of social activism to mask 19th-century robber-baron monopolization of its markets remains diabolically brilliant. After all, those who have rings in their noses, and wear tie-dye and flip-flops cannot have anything in common with either John D. Rockefeller, Jay Fisk, or Big Brother, right?

Don’t we remember how hipster Apple idealists once fought stodgy Microsoft? Or how liberal techies at Microsoft earlier took on dour, big blue, coat-and-tie IBM and “print” media? Surely, good Harvard drop-out tech revolutionaries cannot possibly have become bad, trillion-dollar corporate cartels?

Serious Big Brother was never coming to America kicking and screaming in a suit and in a mile-long tie, but rather eagerly welcomed in with jeans and sneakers without socks. The First Amendment could always survive a crude, inebriated Joe McCarthy, but not so easily a social justice ex-barista, doing vanity selfies about diversity, egged on by the “progressive” media, while saving the planet, and “reining” in a hurtful, racist media.

Constitutional nihilists do not put up leaders with garish comb-overs and orange tans. Better to unconstitutionally use the FBI to surveil your enemies, catalog the communications of the press, and weaponize the IRS, when led by a “constitutional law professor” and an icon of the marginalized.

Trump, as Public Enemy No. 1, was banned from Twitter for life and barred from most other social media indefinitely. So were many conservatives, some high-profile, some you’ve never heard of. Implicitly, we are asked to forget that “correct” rioters and looters this summer often coordinated their attacks on Facebook and bragged of them in real-time on Twitter.

There are now social media categories of “good” bad and “bad” bad, depending on the age, flags, insignia, look, and fashion of the thugs. Good mobs hate Trump agendas, bad ones do not. Good “white” people who are programmed correctly vote for Biden; bad “white” people who voted for Trump need deprogramming. Again, how that would proceed presumably is under discussion.

The high-brow New York Times runs good fashion hype on the cool violent Antifa look; the low-brow New York Post of course does not run bad glamor encomia to the crazed violators of the Capitol.

Meanwhile, foreign terrorist leaders like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted freely their death threats to Israel. In Internet wokespeak, to call for the death of millions is a mere statistic.
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There is more.

 You are not paranoid if you think the left is out to get you for the sin of supporting Trump.  It is a huge undertaking to deprogram 75 million people, but that is their objective.  It is a bigger job than Hitler had imposing fascism on a country.  I think it is closer to Stalin's reprogramming of the Soviets who survived his gulags.

I think the Democrats' biggest problem is going to be hanging on to their slim majorities for more than two years as millions who voted for them immediately regret their vote.