Nerd hero Edward Snowden responded to a vocal coalition of critics — including many of his former acolytes — who believe he contributed to Donald Trump’s election by encouraging his followers to vote for third-party candidates.
In October, Snowden pointed to a New York Times election forecast that had Hillary Clinton with a 93 percent chance of winning and tweeted that “there may never be a safer election in which to vote third party.”
Despite his track record of challenging authority, the Moscow-based activist was taken in by overconfident polling and gamified election coverage. Today, he addressed it:
This tweet taught me political science is not a science. https://t.co/wL9n707piq
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 15, 2016
The minor mea culpa didn’t satisfy people who are convinced that third-party voters lost the election for Clinton. It’s tough to argue that hypothetical, given that it’s unclear how many third-party voters would have broken for Trump, but there are scenarios in which they could have handed Clinton the Electoral College.
Snowden has generally been upheld as a superhero by the left, and much of his constituency feels personally and principally threatened by Trump’s authoritarian positions on civil rights and the press. To them, a surveillance state under the control of an egomaniacal authoritarian is nothing short of disastrous.
Snowden has no love for Clinton, which makes sense given that she said the whistleblower shouldn’t be allowed to return to the US without “facing the music.” He also has no love for Trump, who he believes will aggravate America’s march toward a police state. Who did Snowden support? He never explicitly said, but Snowden praised Bernie Sanders over Clinton. The Vermont socialist has a lot in common with Snowden — both are cerebral, uncompromising, and disruptive.
The question of who becomes the next president is obviously very important to Snowden, both because he cares about democracy and because he wants to come home. Snowden is campaigning for protection from Barack Obama, riding on the publicity from Oliver Stone’s film Snowden, but the sitting president has given no indication of a forthcoming pardon.
Trump, for his part, has called Snowden a “traitor” and implied that he should be executed — although in an amusing twist, Alex Jones of InfoWars, a Trump stronghold, said he plans to push the president-elect for a pardon.
“Look, at the end of the day, the MVP was the leakers,” Jones said, referring to emails leaked from the Democratic National Committee. “In fact, next time I talk to him I’m going to bring that up. ‘Sir, I understand that you think it’s treason if somebody’s giving us secret data, but what if it’s illegal? That’s what got you in, you know, it would be really gracious if you did a pardon for Snowden,’ and I think that’s something Trump should really do."
