
Eighteen long and laden months have passed since the Ecuadorian government, in synchrony with the British government, and under the instruction of the American government, transferred Julian Assange from one informal jail to an official gaol, and through this single act of relocation repealed the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. This event, one which the historians of the present are determined to forget, did not commence, nor did it conclude, my own process of political disillusionment, but still, it would be difficult to exaggerate its importance, not just in my own life, but in the chronicle of American civilization. It has immeasurably broadened my political perspective by narrowing my focus to a single point: the measures that can be taken to free Assange before the machinery of the state ends his life. Needless to say, it was this imperative that drew me to Tulsi Gabbard’s ill-fated presidential campaign, repelled me from Bernie Sanders’s masquerade, alienated me from the Democratic Party, reinvigorated my contempt for the Republican Party, and muddled every one of my opinions of Donald Trump.
“Assange or nothing,” I have occasionally tweeted. No other political consideration will seriously guide me in five days’ time, when I enter a narrow, unstable booth and cast a meaningless ballot. It is meaningless, not just politically, but also practically, as President Trump is trailing Joe Biden in New Hampshire by eight points or more, according to the most recent bit of polling. Never have I been inclined to vote for Biden, who once compared Assange to a “high-tech terrorist” and who, last year, penned a prolix malediction of Assange for the New York Times, thereby answering the question I was prevented from asking him on the campaign trail. After all, it is Biden’s Democratic Party that has inexorably propagated the political fiction that is Russiagate, a dizzying conspiracy theory that, for all its flimsy incoherence, has besmirched Assange’s reputation among the liberals who halfheartedly defended him before the Trumpish Age. They have unknowingly partnered with the neoconservatives who, in their more outspokenly cynical support for the tyrannical function of the American Empire, have always been unsympathetic to Assange.
We are bereft of proof, even the most tenuous of circumstantial evidence, that Biden and his Party have any true affinity with Assange. Only by the disorienting impact of propagandistic admass are the people convinced that the Democrats believe in freedom of information, transparency of state, and the other principles for which Assange and Wikileaks advocate—such principles with which the Democrats take umbrage. If they truly championed such causes, then they would acknowledge the veracity of Wikileaks’s most troubling revelations and take meaningful action to improve their own Party. Instead, they have dismissed the work of this publisher as the malicious (although not necessarily fallacious) activity of a “hostile foreign government” and blamed it for their failings at the ballot box.
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