Trump’s thought police may already have your name in
their database, which is growing — according to Kash Patel — at the rate of around
300% right now. They’re not looking for people who’ve committed crimes, but,
rather, for people who they think may commit crimes in the future.
Thought and opinion crimes.
Yeah, like in the movie Minority Report, only with an Orwell 1984 twist. You could
call it the FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.
We shouldn’t be surprised, as horrific as this is. When
wannabe dictators are elected to lead countries and want to end their
democracies and impose absolute rule, they typically follow a simple series of
steps, sometimes referred to as “The Dictator’s Playbook.” They:
— Purge government institutions of professionals and
replace them with yes-men and groveling toadies.
— Strip their political party of anybody who’d even consider challenging them.
— Help friendly oligarchs buy up the nation’s primary media and turn it into a
mouthpiece for the new regime, while directing billions in government contracts
as recompense to those same men.
— Pack the courts so they and their buddies can crime without consequence while
they drain the government of wealth.
— Build a separate, parallel police force loyal first and foremost to Dear
Leader they can use to terrify the population and “keep order.” (Schutstaffel,
Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Tonton Macoute, Central Nacional
de Informaciones, Brigada Político-Social, KGB/FSB, ICE, etc.)
But key to their entire identity and supporting their
base of power is their ability to identify “an enemy within” and convince
enough of the population that these people represent such a danger to the
nation that they must be suppressed. If you’re a democrat or lean that
direction, that’s you and me. And that’s now.
Reporter Ken Klippenstein has been on this beat for a
while, and his newsletter is well worth the read. He first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National
Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7.” It
identifies as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who
espouse:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity,
… extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility
towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards
those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards
those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime —
specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists
of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI
Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police
departments across America.
And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five
years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and
opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity,
billionaires, or Tradwives.
But that was just the beginning.
Now, this week, Klippenstein has found that Patel
has set up within the FBI a group — including 10 different federal
investigative and police agencies — to “proactively” identify those of us who
may disagree with their opinions about religion, gender, or capitalism.
The old “Terrorism Screening Center” set up in the wake
of 9/11 to look for guys from Saudi Arabia who may want to learn to fly planes
without landing them has been shut down and replaced with the “Threat Screening
Center.”
And Bin Laden’s guys aren’t the “threat” they’re looking
for: it’s those “potential domestic terrorists” who aren’t sufficiently
Christian; who oppose the abuses and excesses of the “free market’s”
unregulated no-holds-barred monopoly capitalism; and are or have friends who
are queer or otherwise support the queer community.
One of the most troubling parts of the entire story is
that America’s mainstream media appears to have no interest in this whatsoever,
even though it appears right there in Trump’s new budget and is already up and
operating within the DOJ and FBI.
And, ironically, reporters — particularly those for what
Republicans call “liberal” publications and media outlets — would probably be
among Patel’s prime targets. As Klippenstein notes: “Again, all of these
developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.”
Which tosses the responsibility for letting Americans know about the new Schutstaffel that, come election time, may well be rounding up or at least “visiting” people on its list, to you and me. America was founded on the idea that your thoughts and opinions are your own, and the government has no business regulating them or punishing you for them.
Under today’s GOP, Putin is writing our European/NATO foreign policy, Netanyahu is writing our Middle Eastern foreign policy, and now, it appears, the late George Orwell is writing our domestic policy.
The question, then, isn’t whether this is happening — it
already is and they’re bragging about it — but whether we’ll tolerate it. If we
continue to let the Trump regime and the GOP decide which thoughts and opinions
are acceptable and which make you a criminal suspect, we’ve already given up
the very freedoms our Constitution was written to protect.
Our answer has to be loud, visible, and relentless:
sunlight, outrage, and actions like protesting, contacting our elected
officials, and voting before the Trump/Republican machinery of hate and
suspicion becomes a permanent new normal in America.
-Thom Hartmann







