Since the election's over, and we've spent a week litigating the past, I thought it might be interesting to see what the future might hold.
Now, I'm not going to make any solid predictions, because I've been around long enough to know that there's always things coming down the pike that you can't see coming. However, what I will be doing is looking at the past and present, and then extrapolating that out into what I see as POSSIBLE paths forward.
Please submit your own thoughts.
TRUMP:
Trump will not concede. Don't get me wrong, there's not going to be a civil war, the military won't be required to drag him from the Whithouse, but he will forever stick to the story that he was illegally cheated out of the presidency. Will the legal challenges go ahead? Probably. He won't spend his own money on them, but if his supporters are willing to donate funds, he will be more than happy to piss their money up against the wall (that he didn't build). He will continue to do rallies, not just because he's an egomaniac who loves giving speeches, but keeping the victim narrative alive will be integral in dragging his supporter base over into his next business venture.
Before Trump was elected, there was a rumour that he was going to team up with Roger Ailes to start his own conservative online news network. If you don't remember, Ailes was the founder and long-time head of Fox News, and was removed from that position by Rupert Murdoch after he became ground zero for the #MeToo movement (Weinstein might have become the face, but he wasn't the first). Well, Ailes might be dead, but that doesn't mean Trump TV is off the table. In fact, given that Fox was the first news network to call the election for Biden, and the thermo-nuclear phone-call Trump is reported to have had with Murdoch as a result, I'd almost be surprised if it didn't go ahead.
BIDEN/KAMALA:
While Trump was in charge, I thought for sure we were going to get a war with Iran. Now, I think it's more of a 50/50 prospect.
Expect the return of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, possibly under a different name.
Health-care is an interesting one. On the one hand, the American health system is full of giant corporations who spend a lot of money on politicians, and have no intention of letting themselves be nationalised. On the other hand, there is a huge push, by corporations outside of the health sector, to reduce employee benefits such as health insurance. These companies also spend a lot of money on politicians, and for them, the prospect of socialised medicine seems like a god-send. The most obvious path then, would be to keep the private for-profit health system, but have the government pay the bills, effectively turning health into another giant money-pit, similar to the military and agricultural sectors.
CORPORATIONS:
There was a time when the big social media platforms presented themselves as dedicated bastions of free speech. In general, the only things that would get you banned were direct threats of violence and paedophilic content. All that changed after 2016. The people working for the silicone valley giants felt that they had unleashed some sort of existential evil on the world by allowing Trump supporters to coalesce on their platforms. In the months that followed, secret recordings of Google and Facebook staff meetings, where people were crying and vowing "never again", were leaked online. And so, the great yeeting began. Obviously, the first scalp big enough to get mainstream attention was Alex Jones—not a big deal for me personally, since I find Jones' shit unwatchable. But since then, I've lost track of the number of amateur political pundits I follow who've been kicked off of various social media platforms for talking about what are now forbidden topics. There is now a very narrow window of political opinion which is considered acceptable, and expressing any thoughts outside that window is considered playing with fire.
Interestingly, platforms like Twitter have taken steps to start allowing pro-paedophilic content, but that's a topic for another day.
More worrying than the social media platforms, is the financial institutions. I guess technically, it started when Paypal, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard all simultaneously banned Wikileaks, but that's certainly not where it ended. Most of the pundits I mentioned have also been banned from accessing online payment processors, and in the last year or so, this has extended out into personal banking as well. There's a small anti-immigration party in Britain called "Patriotic Alternative", and in the last couple of months, the leadership of that party have had their personal bank accounts shut down. Now, let's be clear—this wasn't the result of a criminal investigation—this was the banks themselves (yes, there were multiple banks involved), taking it on their own initiative to freeze the personal bank accounts of political dissidents, and after leaving them without access to money for several weeks, sending them a cheque and telling them "We don't want to know you, take your business elsewhere".
So, the question is, now that Trump is out of the Whitehouse, do the corporations start to wind back the censorship and political persecution, or does it only get more intense from here? I can't make a judgement call on this one, but I'll certainly be interested to see where it goes.
