RIDE THAT BLUE WAVE….TO THE GROUND
It’s that time again. The parade of theatrics we call an election. Only this time, the “stakes were higher” than they were four years ago. Once again, we were told that this was “the most important election in our lifetime” and we were all shamed into voting for Senator Joe Biden, a literal segregationist sympathizer, because “people’s lives depend on it.”
For four years, spineless and ideologically weak, self-proclaimed Resistance Liberals (as if it’s so radical to resist someone like Donald Trump — give me a break) have been on a mission to ensure that this election would be a Blue Wave, meaning that Trump would be defeated by the next Democratic candidate (as long as it’s not Bernie Sanders!) in a landslide on November 4, 2020.
And how did that turn out? It failed!! There was no blue wave! Shocker! As I write this, we are two days past the election of 2020 and no winner has been declared because the race is too close to call. People all over the internet keep asking the question, “how can the race be this close after four years of that asshole Trump?” when the answer is so obvious: if the candidates were that close to each other in almost everything, then of course the race would also be close. As the country waits for ballots to be counted in Nevada and Pennsylvania, Democrats have to reckon with the fact that they lost House seats and have fallen short of a Senate majority. After all that Blue Wave talk, Tuesday was not a stinging condemnation of President Donald Trump.
It turns out campaigning on a platform of empty platitudes and identity politics doesn’t work anymore. People want to hear that their lives will materially benefit from voting for you. Votes still have to be earned. Simply hating Trump isn’t enough to get people to vote for you.
What is so frustrating is that a Blue Wave was possible….if they ran Bernie Sanders, who had the same popularity and enthusiasm among voters as he did in 2016.
BIDEN WILL STILL WIN…BUT IT’S NO REASON TO CELEBRATE
But still, all signs point to Joe Biden as the next President of the United States. It is nothing to celebrate though. A Biden win is a hollow victory. It is no win for democracy. It is not a win for the people. It is not a win for the environment. It is certainly not a win for racism. A Biden presidency will be full of neoliberal austerity, censorship, corporatism, technocratic rule, inverted totalitarianism, and the most anti-communist sentiment since the Reagan era.
I’ll admit, I’m angry that Biden won. I believe that liberals could learn a thing or two with another election loss. I don’t want to see their smug condescension or their performative wokeness or their obsession with credentialism validated. I’m disappointed that they will see demonizing the Left and moving the party to the right as winning strategies. The next four years are going to be INSUFFERABLE. And trust me, liberals will do nothing to pull Biden to the left.
I will probably never get over the anger at seeing how hard the Democrat party worked together to destroy Bernie Sanders in the primaries. They worked harder to destroy his campaign and kick him off the ballot than they did to get us universal healthcare, universal basic income, stimulus checks during the pandemic, student loan forgiveness, a Green New Deal, abolish ICE, or to support the Black Lives Matter movement.
WHO REALLY STOLE THE ELECTION?
There is a lot of talk about how Trump is trying to steal the election and that’s true but let’s face it — the Democrats definitely did their share of rigging and voter suppression too. Last winter, Bernie Sanders was the most electable candidate and their smartest choice to put on the Democrat ticket. During the Democratic primaries, there was blatant rigging and voter suppression at the polls. Rachel Maddow, who is most famous for spending two years of her primetime MSNBC show hawking Russiagate conspiracy theories, even said that Bernie had “blood on his hands” for “forcing people to go out in the middle of a pandemic to vote for him.” Then came the South Carolina primaries when Barack Obama forced Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to pull out of the race, then propped up Joe Biden as the decided frontrunner, despite all evidence proving otherwise. On Tuesday, in the general elections, the Green Party was kicked off the ballot in many states that Biden needed in order to secure the necessary 270 electoral votes. How is this in any way democratic? And why don’t we hear about it?
And just to be clear: The Democrat Party is NOT the left. They are not left-leaning. They are not leftists. They are right-wing neoliberals.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA WILL NOT KEEP THE NEW ADMINISTRATION IN CHECK
We rarely hear anything negative about the Democrat officials because the media is controlled by liberal elites who favor the Democrat party. Just recently, journalist Glenn Greenwald resigned from the publication he helped found, The Intercept, because they censored an article he wrote that was critical of Biden and feared it would hurt him in the election. “The only reason people are getting interested in and ready to scrutinize what I write is because everyone is afraid of being accused of having published something harmful to Biden,” Greenwald said. “That’s the reality.”
What will this mean for independent media publications in a Biden era? Will they be forced to fall in line and join in the propagandist nature of their mainstream counterparts by only publishing content that shows the new administration in a positive light? Will they also suffer the fate of journalists like Glenn Greenwald? Without the media keeping the new administration in check, how much corruption and looting of the American people and the rest of the world will the government and mega-corporations get away with?
WHAT WOULD A DEMOCRAT AS PRESIDENT WITH A REPUBLICAN SENATE LOOK LIKE?
In short, it’s everything the ruling class and Wall Street could ever wish for. It ensures that nothing will get passed.
We’ve seen this scenario before. In the last two years of Obama’s presidency, we had a Republican-led Senate. But it is predicted to be much worse than last time. According to Washington Post:
In 2014, Mitch McConnell became majority leader after Obama had already achieved most of his major legislative goals, including passing the Affordable Care Act. But since his re-election on Tuesday, now McConnell has a chance to sabotage a Democratic president right from the start.
What does that mean? For starters, you can take all those meticulously prepared policy plans Biden and his team devised during the campaign and toss them in the trash. There will be no expansion of health coverage, no aggressive legislation to address climate change, no move toward universal child care, no increase in the minimum wage, no new Voting Rights Act and no infrastructure spending. None of it.
Nor will there be a new stimulus bill to help the economy recover from the pandemic, since McConnell knows that Biden will be blamed if the economy continues to struggle. At most — and even this is no guarantee — McConnell may allow continuing resolutions that keep the government open at its current funding levels. There will be no other significant legislation as long as Republicans retain control.
Such a comprehensive stonewall would be unprecedented in American history. But McConnell has shown not just a willingness but an eagerness to violate any norm or rule if it serves his party’s purposes and he thinks he can get away with it.
Basically, Biden is powerless against a majority Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell. He’ll prove to be a weak president. On the other hand, he will also prove that Trump was never the problem.
Still think it’s a victory for the American people that Biden was elected and we got rid of the orange bogeyman? It gets even worse…
THE GOOGLE ANTI-TRUST LAWSUIT: INVERTED TOTALITARIANISM
This is where the terms “inverted totalitarianism” and “technocratic rule” come in. More people need to know about it because it’s terrifying.
But first, credit where credit is due. Donald Trump’s Department of Justice launched an antitrust action against Google, accusing the tech giant of unlawfully protecting its search monopoly through “anti-competitive and exclusionary practices.” It is the first major antitrust action taken against the new wave of tech giants – Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook – and is likely to be just the start in a series of legal challenges to their oversized market power. (Justice Department files landmark antitrust case against Google, Los Angeles Times)
But the big thing isn’t the particulars of the lawsuit, it’s that Trump is the one who launched it…and why.
See, the conservatives see broad anti-conservative sentiment in “mainstream media” and it’s a big talking point to force social media companies and service providers to stop discriminating against conservative viewpoints. They actually have a legit case there because Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube de-platformed a bunch of right-wing public figures like Alex Jones and Richard Spencer. What isn’t clear is if they violated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 by doing so.
They see the monopolistic power of the Big 6, or the Silicon Six, as some people refer to them, as a “threat to free speech and civil liberties.” I have no sympathy for white supremacists. Period. The week after Twitter kicked QAnon off their platform and everyone cheered, however, they started manipulating leftist anti-imperialist accounts too. On my own Instagram account, my most censored posts are the ones critical of the Obama administration, the Biden campaign and the current Democrat party. By contrast, my anti-Trump posts have actually been boosted by the algorithm.
We’ve collectively handed over the power to decide what is truth and what is “disinformation” to giant private companies that are in collaboration with the imperialist authoritarian state.
So while Trump’s intentions for launching this antitrust action aren’t pure, he isn’t wrong. Political and press repression are going to be a major trend in the upcoming Biden era. And it won’t be talked about. Celebrities, many of them bundlers for the Democrat party, are already pleading with their fans not to criticize the Biden or the Democrats publicly. Leftist journalists and organizations are being silenced, de-platformed and discredited even more often than right-wing content creators. Protesters are constantly put in jail. Leftist activists have been murdered and no suspects have ever been charged or convicted.
US imperialism always wins, no matter the outcome of the election.
ONCE BIDEN IS PRESIDENT, WHICH COUNTRY WILL HE BOMB FIRST?
US imperialism and foreign intervention will absolutely flourish under Biden. While Trump was completely incompetent when it came to staging a coup in Latin America, Biden will have the full backing of the military and the CIA. This is where you have to wonder if having a more competent imperialist as President is actually a good thing (it isn’t).
The reason the entire world watches our elections is because they are also affected by our policies. For decades, our progress has been possible because of the misery, violence and poverty we’ve inflicted on foreign countries, especially in the global south.
One of Biden’s campaign promises was to “reestablish American leadership.” That’s nothing more than a euphemism for “we’re going to kill so many people abroad.” And it will all be wrapped up in the language of social justice, just like it was under Obama.
THE REALIGNMENT OF PARTIES
The Republican Party is now becoming the party of the working class. And they made gains with every single ethnic group except for white men. Liberals need to start acknowledging that most of them are in a different social class than most of America but they keep trying to push this identitarianism on us that denies it all. No matter how multi-racial the Democrat Party claims it is, the fact remains that there are less working class people supporting them. It’s white suburbans and wealthier people of color. This is what happens when you push credentialism and austerity measures down everyone’s throats like they did during the Obama era. Will this trend continue? Who knows.
Check out these polls from Fox News that were taken on the day of the election. I am starting to wonder if in 2024, we will have a truly economically liberal — but very socially conservative candidate emerge from the Republicans. It almost seems as though Fox is grooming its audience already. Someone with an actual platform but a potentially dangerous nationalist agenda. That would be the smart thing for them to do. It would materially benefit the citizens of this country. But at an extremely high cost. And in 2024, after four years of neoliberal austerity, a pandemic and an economic depression, many will have no choice but to go along with it. This is what we signed up for when we elected Joe Biden as our next President.
I actually recorded an entire episode about this topic on my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, with my cohosts Filip Guo and Chris Jesu Lee…
In this episode, The Unverifieds come with their hottest of hot takes of Election 2020 as it's still baking in the oven. Sen. Joe Biden looks poised to win after a scary night that was eerily reminiscent of 2016. But it feels more like a Pyrrhic victory — a Democratic Party with no vision for the future and the Republicans ready to run the Trump playbook without Trump's personal liabilities in 2024. And with signs that the Democratic identity politics ideology is starting to crumble, where will Asian Americans go since they never fit into that model in the first place?
Recent Posts
I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother. Instead I want to highlight a project of mine that I am particularly proud of — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost with my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo. If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.