On a cold, dark, winter day, Joe Biden spoke to a small crowd after being sworn in as the 46th President of the United States of America. The euphemisms of his inaugural speech are lost on a great number of Americans.
With several references to the Capitol breach two weeks before, Joe Biden, now the 46th President of the US, vowed in his inaugural speech that he seeks to unify the nation. That will be a tall if not impossible order, given the fact that a great number of Americans believe that the election was stolen and that the result derives not from democracy but from fraud.
Biden will have a difficult time uniting a nation as bitterly divided as the US is today. It will not be enough to issue bromides like the ones Biden proffered. When many Americans believe that they will now be targeted for their “political extremism” and cancelled from the public square, they hear his call for “unity” as a call for conformity with the state-party line, which many fear will now be univocal. They fear that their voices will not only be unwelcome but also squelched by a mass and social media wholly aligned with the singular state-party line of the Democratic Party.
Biden’s speech today could very well have been a triumphant one, if in fact a transparent investigation of voting “irregularities” had been undertaken and a protest rally by Trump supporters had not turned into a “riot” initiated by who-knows-whom, before then-President Donald Trump had even stopped speaking.
Biden comes to power after Democrats and the intelligence community sought to derail Trump’s presidency from Day One, with the full force of the mass and social media behind this effort. Trump’s presidency was never seen as legitimate by the Democrats and their “deep-state” accomplices, so the calls for unity will fall on many deaf ears.
Biden’s speech for unity comes after an arguably politicized response to the coronavirus outbreak, with the shutdown of small business and the loss of millions of jobs, which seemed, to many, to be part of an orchestrated attempt to ruin Trump’s economy.
It comes after mass and social media memory-holed all references to Biden family business deals in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere, all the while allowing and promoting only negative coverage of Trump. Ironically, what was deemed “fake news” only began to be covered after the election of Biden.
It comes after social media purges that have included Trump himself, as well as tens of thousands if not millions of Trump supporters. These many millions of Americans do not trust the establishment to unify with them. They believe that unity will only come with the silencing of their voices and the crushing of dissent.
It comes after Democratic members of Congress demonize the opposition and call for their re-education.
And it comes after an electoral process that many millions see as having been fatally flawed.
Yet Biden calls for unity and vows that his presidency will be for “all Americans.” Certainly, such calls for unity will be met with deep suspicion, if not outright incredulity.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.