A security expert goes to the precise analogy: ISIS. Think ISIS and you can begin to think clearly about how to end our national nightmare. Make our native ISIS undergo decline.
Trump’s insistence that, despite all evidence, he won the election helped Democrats win both Georgia seats. Not even his followers can depend on him: Under pressure, he essentially conceded the election on Thursday, which meant either that he is unreliable or that he was lying to them the whole time. He has limited access to effective communication forums, most notably Twitter and Facebook. The platforms’ decision to suspend his accounts was controversial, but deplatforming is a successful counterterrorism technique that, although it may galvanize diehards, impedes a movement leader’s ability to reach new members. The MAGA-world leadership team is in disarray; Pence plans to attend Biden’s inauguration. In welcoming Pence to the event—“I’d be honored to have him there,” the president-elect said—Biden is replicating a common divide-and-conquer counterterrorism strategy that amplifies distrust and leads to paranoia among those who remain inside an extremist group. Companies such as American Express are pulling support for members of Congress who went along with Trump’s effort to block the certification of the electoral vote.
… The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.
****************
The particular analogy for the terrorists’ House and Senate enthusiasts is the mentally challenged young women from European cities who flew off to Syria and fucked one ISIS terrorist after another in order to push out squads of ISIS babies. As these moronic post-ISIS degenerates try to crawl back to England without the citizenship papers that they – whoops! – gleefully burned in YouTubes declaring their new citizenship in a caliphate dedicated to the torture and death of all Britons, they find that they are encountering… oddly… a little trouble being welcomed back.
No self-respecting democratic governing body should ever welcome back the Hawleys and Cruzes and all the others in both houses who revealed their depravity by fucking with domestic terrorism.
Most will, I believe, be voted out in the next cycle; meanwhile, enjoy the manifold forms of shunning — withdrawal of various forms of corporate support; demands for return of donations; rejection of awards, removal of honorary degrees; disbarment; expulsion from a wide variety of civic and private groups, etc., etc. — which all of the elected insurrectionists are currently experiencing. It is a small but important part of what this security expert is talking about – the degradation of the Trump brand.