Hillary Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Joe Biden said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” – while his own Justice Department was trying to incarcerate Trump. Anderson Cooper asked Kamala Harris whether Trump was a fascist, and she answered, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”
The label was never just a label. Twitter banned Trump in January 2021 even though, as I discovered reporting on the Twitter Files, the company had concluded he did not violate its rules. Prosecutors then indicted him. A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts.
Meanwhile, AP [Associated Press] calls the socialist mayor of New York not “far left” but rather “the democratic socialist leader of America’s largest city.”
In the five months after Trump’s inauguration last year, the networks used “far right” and similar labels 1,222 times. They used “far left” 86 times. Another analysis of more than 30 million articles found that American and British media use right-wing extremism labels more than three times as often as left-wing ones.
If you think this ended with the 2024 election, look at what the same people are doing in Europe, because that is the playbook they intend to bring back here [to the USA].
A German court sentenced a journalist to seven months in prison for a satirical image of the interior minister. Prosecutors raided the home of a pensioner who called the vice chancellor an idiot in a meme. Police carried out 46 home searches in a single day for online speech.
Election officials strike opposition candidates from ballots. A Romanian court annulled a presidential election. French judges banned Marine Le Pen from office and a court ordered her to wear an ankle monitor. German bureaucrats kept a local political candidate off the ballot for his interpretation of “Lord of the Rings.”
What they do over there matters over here. The European Commission fined X [Twiter] €120 million after, in the words of the House Judiciary Committee, it “successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules.” Global means you.
Hellbound and Down 