When You're Evil and You're Publicly Attacking Something, That Something Will Become More Popular
Politicians generally understand that if they're very unpopular, any attempt/s to crush their opposition will result in widespread perception that the besieged entity is: 1) scary to the unpopular oppressor; 2) proving that the oppressor is, indeed, an oppressor; 3) the best way to tackle or resist this oppressor.
This observation is universal. We see it everywhere in the world. That's also the reason Wikileaks and Julian Assange became very popular in 2010. They were widely seen as the "Nemesis" of US imperialism (military and political) or "The Resistance".
The moral of the story is, when an oppressor becomes openly oppressive and does anything to squash/censor critics, the outcome will typically be detrimental to the oppressor. We wrote about this months ago. █
