From Substack
No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.
How to use anti-terror laws to protect corporate grandeur
(Image by --Tico-- from flickr) Details DMCA
The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting "terrorism" that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly 20 years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.
We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named "Green Zone," vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of "sedition," treason," and "terrorism" against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of "incitement to violence." It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one's fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.
Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 versio""n of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security website, touting a trademarked phrase licensed to it in 2010 by the City of New York, urging citizens to report "suspicious activity" to the FBI and other security state agenciesThe more honest proponents of this new domestic War on Terror are explicitly admitting that they want to model it on the first one. A New York Times reporter noted on Monday that a "former intelligence official on PBS NewsHour" said "that the US should think about a '9/11 Commission' for domestic extremism and consider applying some of the lessons from the fight against Al Qaeda here at home." More amazingly, Gen. Stanley McChrystal for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of the war in Afghanistan explicitly compared that war to this new one, speaking to Yahoo News: