Each week Liberty Nation straps on its Personal Protective Equipment and dives into the TwitterZone to bring you the biggest news, the most outlandish arguments, and the real Zeitgeist of what is taking place in the internet’s wildest frontier.
Immediately after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, radical leftists assembled on the streets and online to declare that their single political goal for the next four years would be total resistance to the Trump presidency. The phrase “#resist” would trend hundreds of times over the next three years, with members of the mainstream media displaying their defiance of the president specifically and GOP governance overall on their Twitter bios. This week Twitter was ablaze with accusations of sedition levied against Republicans like Michael Flynn, Trump, and, astoundingly, the House Republicans who co-signed Texas’s failed lawsuit to overturn 2020 election results in a handful of states.
Earlier, media headlines touted an idea espoused by Twitter leftists. Representative Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) posted a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Twitter, requesting her to block all Republican colleagues who exhibited “insurrection and rebellious behavior” by signing on to a lawsuit challenging the election results from participating in Congress. Although the suit’s nature was quite speculative and unlikely to bring about any real change, Democrats embraced this new narrative to accuse Republicans of sedition. Many Democrats gleefully supported Pascrell’s ludicrous idea, with more than 200,000 likes and 45,000 retweets.
Ever since Pascrell’s challenge to House Republicans, the mainstream media have incessantly accused Republicans of sedition, the incitement or conducting of rebellion against the state. Republicans supporting such a lawsuit is neither incitement nor rebellion; it is legal for them to contest Electoral College votes. While many Republicans may disagree with recent rhetoric about the illegitimacy of the 2020 presidential elections, they also understand that such challenges are part of our country’s electoral process, no matter how norm-breaking or unprecedented.
Democrats spent the entire Trump presidency obsessed with impeding the president’s agenda. Remember cries of “Not my president” that flooded media headlines and Twitter manifestos? Before winning the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, Democrats cheered federal appeals courts’ that slowed or halted the Trump administration’s executive orders. Even solid-blue states vocalized total opposition to the president on specific issues like climate policy, pledging to defy federal guidelines (as was their right). Republicans at the time didn’t call such acts seditious, but when a state GOP chair calls for solid red states to form similar blocs, he’s called secessionist and a traitor. All these accusations of sedition have gained prominence on Twitter, with Democrats calling Republicans critical of the election traitors trying to overthrow the United States of America.
After unending Twitter campaigns against the Trump presidency, almost three years of investigations into the Russia collusion hoax, and the weaponization of every legal and legislative tool to oppose Trump’s appointments and executive orders, resistance is now characterized as sedition.
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