Trump Supporters Plan "General Strike" to Pressure Congress to Overturn Biden's Win

What is the chatter on the internet the last few days? It depends upon which circles in which you move. The people whom I know and who believe the false narrative that President Trump has been promoting, that the presidential election was stolen from him, a narrative that he had been promoting even before the election, are talking about holding a “general strike” on January 4-6. The expressed purpose of this strike is to pressure Congress into rejecting Joe Biden’s electoral college and popular vote victory and to give President Trump four more years in office. They are talking about a boycott of local businesses and stores and other ways of disrupting the local economy during this three day-period. It is argued that they have a constitutional right to hold peaceful demonstrations. 

Anyone who has any familiarity with the history of “general strikes” knows that they lead to violence. Strikers will attempt to intimidate the public into supporting the action. They will obstruct the entrances to businesses and stores and keep employees and customers from entering the building. They may threaten people. One can expect clashes between those who support the strike and those who are opposed to it. These clashes can quickly turn ugly. 

The online influencers promoting this “general strike” either will not say or do not know who called the strike. This  should set off alarm bells and flashing red lights. The strike may have been called by a foreign actor or a domestic terrorist organization seeking to create political, economic, and social dislocation in the United States, dislocation of which they can take advantage in pursuit of their own aims. It may have been an individual who enjoys stirring up trouble. Or it may have been the Trump Campaign. 

When an association of labor unions calls a general strike, it generally has some measure of control over the strikers although there is always the possibility that a local union may take action that the association does not support. This “general strike” has a strong likelihood of getting out of hand as local groups will be the ones deciding how to interpret the call. Local groups that are prone to violence may decide to go beyond boycotting local businesses and stores. They may adopt more confrontational tactics and resort to the use of threats and force. Whoever called this “general strike,” I suspect knows that it can easily get out of hand and that is their intention.

Boycotting local businesses and stores will further harm local economies that have already suffered damage from the COVID-19 pandemic. Communities like my own have seen businesses and stores go out of business and members of the community lose their jobs. Many families are experiencing financial hardship. This “general strike” is timed for the very same time that a number of these families will be receiving stimulus payments and extended unemployment benefits. This suggests that this “general strike” is not a “peaceful demonstration” as it promoters claim but a serious attempt to disrupt the US economy and to hinder its recovery. Those who called for the “general strike” are either very irresponsible or they are deliberately seeking to do injury to the United States or create civil unrest that they can exploit for their own purposes. In any case they do not have the best interests of the United States at heart.