My answer to the question posed by the title is Biden (and his puppeteers, enablers, sycophants, and far too many Democrats).
Tom Slater, editor of Spiked, agrees with me:
Since [Biden] came to power he has made tackling ‘domestic terrorism’ a priority. In June 2021, his administration published the first-ever national strategy for tackling domestic terrorism, pledging new resources to fight this ill-defined threat…. [I]t is striking that this Democratic-led clampdown on extremism was sparked not by, say, the racist Charleston church shooting at the tailend of the Obama years, but by a big, dumb riot at which the only person shot was a Trump supporter….
… Some have criticised Biden for not introducing a full-blown domestic-terror law, an idea he floated at the beginning of his presidency. Perhaps in response to these criticisms, a new Justice Department unit to counter domestic terrorism was announced in January. Still, the atmosphere this has all created has had a chilling effect – not just on the activities of certifiable extremists, but also on dissenters more broadly. Contrary to various denials by attorney general Merrick Garland, FBI agents were reportedly even sent to investigate parents who were protesting against school boards over critical race theory and mask mandates being pushed on their kids.
The shock of Trump’s election, and with it the revelation that millions of Americans don’t agree with or much like the DC set, seems to have legitimised censorship in the minds of the Democratic elites…. Even before Biden came to power, the spurned elites were pushing for Trumpist voices to be silenced, often piling pressure on private actors to do their bidding. The prime example was Trump himself, who was kicked off the main social-media platforms after ‘January 6’. While the Capitol riot was the excuse, the mass deplatforming of Trump followed years of the Democratic elites demanding he be censored. And of course there was the Hunter Biden laptop story, an explosive New York Post scoop published in the run-up to the 2020 election, alleging corruption on the part of both Joe Biden and his crack-smoking son, Hunter. Twitter and Facebook suppressed the story as ‘intelligence experts’ reflexively dubbed it Russian misinformation. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed last week that Facebook’s suppression of the story followed a visit from FBI officers, who warned the company that a dump of Russian misinfo was on its way. When it arrived, the Hunter laptop story seemed to fit the bill, Zuckerberg said.
This revelation is worth dwelling on for a moment, particularly in light of Biden’s latest comments about the MAGA threat to freedom and democracy. Here we had agents of the American security state essentially leaning on Big Tech firms to censor certain content. As a consequence, a story that could well have influenced the 2020 election result was expunged from much of the digital public square, while Democratic politicians and former intelligence chiefs egged Big Tech on. If that’s not an authoritarian threat to democracy, I don’t know what is. In Twitter’s case, users were banned from sharing the link at all and the Post, America’s oldest daily newspaper, was locked out of its account. All of this utterly explodes the old deflection about Big Tech censorship – that it is just private companies doing as they please – and shows us how destructive this fusion of the security state, sections of the political class and big business is in American life today. Dissent can be crushed with incredible speed and efficiency, while the feds and the politicians can keep their hands clean.
The electoral demise of Trump has not sated this appetite for censorship one bit. Democrats continue to use the power of their offices and allied corporate media to try to limit the scope of debate. Tech CEOs continue to be hauled before Congress every year or so to be berated by Democrats, upset at the slow progress in silencing people they dislike. Leading House Democrats have even taken to writing to cable providers, demanding to know why they are still carrying right-wing channels like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN – a move condemned by Brendan Carr, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, as ‘legislating by letterhead’.
This is a recurring story of the Trump years. The Donald says or does something authoritarian or anti-democratic and then his infuriated opponents show him how it’s really done. Where he is showy and incompetent, they are brutally effective. And while he might have some bands of conspiratorial protesters on his side, his opponents have broad swathes of Big Tech, the corporate media and the US security state. They also have the White House, which makes Joe Biden’s fearmongering the other night about the threat posed to the republic by the MAGA-hatted hordes even more paranoid and ridiculous. America feels like it is caught between competing authoritarianisms. But right now, one is infinitely more threatening than the other.
Infnitely is the right word, given the combined power of the Democrat-controlled federal government and its allies in Big Tech, the corporate world generally, the governments of most major urban and suburban areas, the media, universities, and the public education indoctrination industry.
The Wall Street Journal, courtesy of Tom Smith, is also in fine form:
If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.
Adolf Hitler, 1935:
Joe Biden, 2022: