The 2020 election is over. Joe Biden has been certified by Congress as the winner in the electoral college. Donald Trump can go back to selling steaks to suckers in Manhattan until he is quietly disappeared from all memory, his MAGAts finally put in their place. We can put down our signs and retire our slogans and go back to the business of living, just like after every other election in this country.
Half of the country disputes all this.
The last time that happened, four years ago, a special council was set up to investigate hallucinated Russian activities. Four years of investigation dissipated into nothing but bad blood and name calling between the two sides. This time is different
This time there will be no investigation. Evidence of tampering and testimonials of abuse are suppressed in the public sphere. Twitter accounts are purged and YouTube videos deleted. Alternate social media sites are dehosted by Amazon and websites dedicated to former democrats turned republican are dropped down the Googlehole.
Congress is considering a new government program to address ‘domestic terrorism.’ After 9-11 we got the Patriot Act, which was based on a bill authored by Joe Biden in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombings, as he has boasted. It was shelved but one week after 9-11 it was brought out and presented as a draft for a new terrorism bill. Three months later it was law, even though parts of it were confidential and Congress was not allowed to read them. It took an Ed Snowden to reveal the extent of the gutting of our personal freedoms that it represented. But it was sold to us as ‘fighting terrorism overseas.’ No abuse of the Bill of Rights here.
We will soon have a Domestic Terrorism Act. It will create one more security organization to add to the FBI, the CIA, and the numerous other alphabet spook services we employ who are accountable to no one but themselves. There must be 20 of them by now.
We will be told that the intent of this new organism is benign. Noble, even. “It is needed to fight terrorism at home,” they will tell us. “You’re not against fighting terrorism at home, are you?” reaching for a mouse to click a box on your file. Though there will be no clear definitions of what that might mean.
And parts of it will be classified.
What happens when disenfranchised republicans decide to create a new party? Let’s call it simply, The Conservative Party, and it starts in, where else? Texas. Nothing fancy. No, Society for Kittens and Democracy or anything like that. It’s to be modeled after some of the parliamentary parties in Europe. The name says what it purports to be, now it’s up to the members to decide what it actually is.
It’s initially started by some likeminded and wealthy conservatives who dislike what they see in the political system around them. It’s hardly a ‘grass roots’ movement. Roots need fertilizer and movements need charismatic people to prosper. Our founding fathers were the oligarchs of their day, after all. Rhetoric about ‘We, the People’ was somewhat disingenuous even back then.
They make speeches, raise public awareness, kiss babies, and tap into conservative resentment. And they gain a following. They might just be opportunists who are tapping into a powerful undercurrent, but what they say resonates with the downtrodden. Groups from other states show interest and like-minded lawyers and politicians come and take a look. Soon more branches are opening in more big cities around the gutted red interior of what used to be a united America. They turn into a movement.
They set up headquarters, make a membership list of paying members, write party planks, and establish a platform. They have debates and admonish each other to be a force for good in the world and everything. Once in a while they actually talk about issues. Some people actually listen. All above board and legal by the rules of the system we once had.
Will Domestic Terrorism have the right to infiltrate this new group? Keep dossiers on its members like J. Edgar Hoover did in the 50’s and 60’s? Show up at rallies and try to disrupt them? Slander them on social media, which they are not allowed to join? Will a guy in a goofy Duck Dynasty outfit and Braveheart makeup be filmed at their rallies? Will they be blacklisted?
In the mean time the telescreen tells us how great the Party is. Domestic terrorists in our great nation’s heartland have been thwarted in an attempt to pollute party unity.
One hundred years ago Pinkerton guards were employed to beat up union organizers and disburse protesters. Edward Bernays used psychological tactics, a thing he described in his book, ‘Propaganda,’ to influence Americans that they actually did want to enter the European war in 1917 and fight against people they didn’t know and who had done them no wrong. Before that Americans thought that a European war was, by definition, a European war and not an American war. Why should we want to get involved? That changed with Bernays. He controlled the social media of his day like Hurst and Pulitzer had in the nineteenth century and Franklin had in the eighteenth.
With the fall of the Tsar and the rise of communism, socialism was gaining popularity around the world. The populist president of the day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had a coup attempt fomented against him by the industrialists. The chosen leader, Marine General Smedley Butler, refused and testified before Congress about it. In the 1950’s Senator Joe McCarthy headed a committee in the Senate called the Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Many people’s careers and lives were ruined for merely objecting to his tactics before he was removed.
Sounds a lot like our new Department of Domestic Terrorism. The McCarthy trials made today’s leftist slander and character assassination look tame. I’m sure the new DDT with fix that. Plus they have the Googleburo and political officers at Facebook to cleanse the narrative like Bernays, Hurst, and Franklin had before them.
Is this what we want?
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