Saturday, November 19, 2016

Circular and literal firing squads

Liberals are worried, and the form of that worry is expressed as "we must all come together to fight Trump." So the trope of the circular firing squad comes out. If leftists criticize liberals for losing this election and not defeating Trump -- and for predictably leading us to more Trumps -- then they are forming a circular firing squad, metaphorically shooting at their friends, and so on.

So let's look at what's going on with Snowden. His existence is precarious, to say the least: he lives on Russia's sufferance, and if you believe that Russia wants to make nice with Trump, they could easily ship him off to America for trial, which would be a nice distraction for Trump and would get him some credits with the security state. How would that trial go? Well, Trump's pick for CIA head thinks that Snowden should be executed as a traitor. So we're talking literal firing squads, or some other method of execution.

Needless to say, Snowden is important to the left, for obvious reasons. You would think that he'd be important to people who are interested in encouraging resistance to Trump. After all, we're going to need both Snowden's past information about the security state and the future information of any new whistleblowers in Trump's Presidency who may be either encouraged or frightened by what happens to Snowden.

Obama has the power to stop this. The President can pardon anyone, for any reason, for anything. Obama has said that he doesn't want to and brought up something about Snowden not having presented himself for trial, but Snowden doesn't have to: a Presidential pardon would work anyways. But Obama is not going to, and moreover, I haven't heard anything from the people freaking out about Trump saying that he should.

We aren't allies. People on the left may defend the system, but the system will not defend them in turn. I think that this is a critical realization for everyone to have in the next few months. Keep this in mind as liberals denounce protest, as they are already doing.

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