This week, a number of new people joined the weekly 5 PM protests at 4th and State in response to the speech last Thursday by the President of The United States of America, Donald J. Trump. While the focus of this article is on the protest itself, to understand the protest, you must first understand the causes.
Trump gave a speech, falsely claiming once more that the 2020 election was stolen, and newly implying that the 2018 midterms were also influenced by China, and, on top of this, claiming that anti-Trump journalism was beholden to China. One of his claims is the insecurity of voting machines, which are in fact more secure than counting paper ballots which have to be counted by hand by people (who are prone to errors), leading to large margins of error. As well, both are equally vulnerable, as one would simply need to lie while counting to change the results, hence the requirement of non partisan election overseers.
To ensure secure elections, the most important element is to not have the executive, which has vested interests in the outcome, influencing how it is handled, as well as to have many eyes on the election counting, something we do in fact already do, with many different people counting the votes, leading to very little election fraud occurring in the United States.
This is the context that preceded the protests last week, and it led to a lot of people who were previously not as actively opposed to the government becoming more actively opposed to it. One of these people was David, a man who up until now had not engaged with the protests, but he said that after hearing the speech last Thursday he couldn’t stay idle. “When Trump spoke on Thursday, I knew I had to do something. We can’t stay quiet.” He expressed an opposition broadly to authoritarianism and government overreach, saying “Read multiple sources. If we rely on the government alone, we are doomed.” He left us with a simple one word request when asked if he had anything to say, “Think.”
We thank David for talking to us, and we fully agree with his perspective. More than anything, we ask our readers to question everything, including ourselves. We hope that when you read the news you keep his one request in mind and think.