Yves here. The fast, determined, and aggressive response to widespread campus protests against genocide demonstrates how our purported leaders are so insecure in their hold on power that they over-react against perceived threats when they have the ability to do so. It was gratifying to see students en masse rise up against reprehensible injustice in which very very few had any personal stake. And this was after a protracted period of only few and feeble protests, as if the combination of student debt, the surveillance state, an over-time worsening environment for getting established in a career, housing, and a solid relationship, and pervasive propaganda had successfully sapped the life out of demonstrating. But the coordinated 17-city paramilitary crackdown against Occupy was a precursor to the clearing and cordoning of campuses this year. This post argues that the “homeland security campus” was underway even before then.
Note the mention of the NYPD at the close of this piece. In the days of Occupy, Mayor Bloomberg bragged about having the seventh largest army in the world. Oh, and even then, some of its members trained with the IDF.
By Michael Gould-Wartofsky. Originally published at TomDispatch
The academic year that just ended left America’s college campuses in quite a state: with snipers on the rooftops and checkpoints at the gates; quads overrun by riot squads, state troopers, and federal agents; and even the scent of gunpowder in the air.
In short, in the spring semester of 2024, many of our campuses came to resemble armed camps.
What’s more, alongside such brute displays of force, there have been congressional inquisitions into constitutionally protected speech; federal investigations into the movement for divestment; and students suspended, evicted, and expelled, not to speak of faculty disciplined or simply dismissed.
Welcome to Repress U., class of 2024: a homeland security campus for the ages.
But don’t think it all only happened this spring. In reality, it’s an edifice that’s been decades in the making, spanning the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden administrations. Some years ago, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, I wrote a step-by-step guide to how the original homeland security campus was created. Let me now offer an updated manual on the workings of Repress U. in a newly oppressive era.
Consider the building of just such a homeland security campus a seven-step process. Here they are, one by one.
Step 1. Target the movement for divestment.
As a start, unconditional government support for the state of Israel triggered a growing movement of student dissent. That, in turn, came to focus on the imperial entanglements and institutional investments of this country’s institutions of higher learning. Yet, instead of negotiating in good faith, university administrators have, with a few exceptions, responded by threatening and even inviting state violence on campus.
Nor, in a number of cases, did this offensive against the student left start, or end, at the campus gates. For instance, a targeted campaign against Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) kicked off in October, when the State University System of Florida, working with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, announced that “based on the National SJP’s support of terrorism… the student chapters must be deactivated.”
Private universities would soon join in with their own public displays of intolerance. Brandeis, Rutgers, George Washington, and Harvard all imposed similar sanctions on student groups. Columbia broke new ground by suspending not only SJP but also Jewish Voice for Peace after its student chapter held “an unauthorized event… that included threatening rhetoric.”
Over the course of the academic year, the student movement has been elevated, at least rhetorically speaking, to the level of a national security threat — one which has figured prominently in White House briefings and House Republican hearings. And by far the greater part of the threatening rhetoric overheard in recent weeks has been directed not by the movement, but at the movement.
“We have a clear message,” said House Committee on Education and Labor Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) in announcing the latest round of congressional inquisitions. “American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back. No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured, or graduations are being ruined.” Held on May 23rd, the hearings were an exercise in twenty-first-century McCarthyism, with House Republicans going on the warpath against “radicalized students” and “so-called university leaders.”
President Biden, when speaking of the student movement, has struck a hardly less belligerent tone, declaring that “vandalism, trespassing… shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest” and that “order must prevail.”
Step 2. Censor pro-Palestinian speech.
For all the talk of free speech and the right to protest, pro-Palestinian advocacy and antiwar activism have, in these last months, come to represent a notable exception to the rule. From the words of commencement speakers to the expressive acts of student occupiers, outright censorship has become the order of the day.
Take the case of Asna Tabassum, a graduating senior scheduled to give this month’s valedictorian address at the University of Southern California. When, on social media, Tabassum dared link to a page denouncing “racist settler-colonial ideology,” she was subjected to an organized smear campaign and ultimately barred from speaking at commencement.
Across the country, the cancellations have piled up. The Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd was banned from speaking at the University of Vermont. The artist Samia Halaby saw her first American retrospective cancelled by the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University. And a group of Jewish students seeking to screen a film critical of Israel were denied space at the University of Pennsylvania.
Again, the trail of repression leads all the way back to Washington, D.C. Over the course of the past year, since the White House released its “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have shown an increasingly active interest in policing what can and can’t be said on campus.
According to the latest White House fact sheet, dated May 7th, “FBI and DHS have taken steps to expand and deepen engagements with campus law enforcement and others.” Such “engagement” has been evident for all to see in the recent crackdowns on campuses like Columbia’s, where the administration bragged, in a leaked internal memo, about “coordinating with the FBI.”
Step 3. Punish student protest.
It was not enough, however, for certain university administrators to ban Students for Justice in Palestine or censor pro-Palestinian speech. It was also imperative that they make students pay. The punishments have varied, ranging from interim suspensions to permanent expulsions to evictions from campus housing. What they have in common is a logic of retribution for even distinctly nonviolent student protests.
It became common practice for administrations to demand that students leave their on-campus encampments or be barred from graduating. In Harvard’s case, the Corporation went ahead and struck 13 pro-Palestinian students from the rolls anyway, just days before commencement.
Expulsions have also proliferated in the wake of the occupation of administration buildings, from Columbia’s Hamilton Hall to Vanderbilt’s Kirkland Hall. In justifying the expulsions, Vanderbilt’s chancellor helpfully explained, “My point of view had nothing to do with free speech.”
Last but not least, student dissidents have been the victims of doxxing, with their names and faces prominently displayed under the banner of “Leading Antisemites” on billboards in public places and on websites belonging to a far-right organization, Accuracy in Media. The group was recently revealed to be bankrolled to the tune of nearly $1.9 million by top Republican megadonors.
Step 4. Discipline faculty dissent.
Students have not been the only targets of such repression. They have been joined by faculty and other employees of colleges and universities, who have also faced disciplinary action for standing up for the rights of Palestinians. By one count, more than 50 faculty members have been arrested, while hundreds more have been disciplined by their employers.
The backlash began last fall with the suspension of two educators at the University of Arizona, then ramped up with the summary firing of two teaching assistants at the University of Texas at Austin. Their offenses? Sharing mental health resources with Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students, who had specifically requested them in the wake of October 7th.
Further controversy attended the suspension of a tenured political science professor, Abdulkader Sinno, at Indiana University following an “unauthorized event” held by the school’s Palestine Solidarity Committee (which Sinno advised). Then came the removal of a noted Palestinian-American artist and activist, Amin Husain, from his adjunct position at New York University.
The University of Florida, for its part, circulated a directive threatening that “employees will be… separated from employment” should they be “found responsible for engaging in prohibited activities,” including “disruption,” indoor demonstrations, or outdoor encampments.
And Washington University in St. Louis, in April, placed six employees on leave after they were accused of participating in a Gaza solidarity protest and allowing “unauthorized persons” onto campus. That same day, another Palestinian-American professor, Steve Tamari, of Southern Illinois University, had nine ribs fractured and one of his hands broken while exercising his right to film the police.
Step 5. Lock the community out, but let the vigilantes in.
In the face of sustained student protest, universities have converted themselves into heavily guarded, gated communities, each with its private security force, and each with its own laws to enforce. “Harvard Yard will be closed today,” read a typical text, in bold red letters hanging from Johnston Gate. “Harvard affiliates must produce their ID card when requested.”
Other schools have responded to the encampments with a new architecture of control, extending from the metal barricades erected around George Washington’s University Yard to the plywood walls now surrounding New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still others, like Columbia, went as far as to cancel their major commencement ceremonies, given “security concerns.”
At the same time, the private firms entrusted with the public’s safety on college campuses have failed to intervene to keep far-right agitators out. Instead, as seen at the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, they have allowed vigilante violence to run wild.
At UCLA, on the night of April 30th, a gang of anti-Palestinian militants, wearing white masks and bearing blunt instruments and incendiary devices, were permitted to terrorize the school’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment for more than three hours before public officials felt compelled to take action. At least 16 serious injuries were reported. Not one of the attackers was detained.
“At first, I couldn’t understand why,” reported one eyewitness to the bloodshed. “But an hour in, and then two hours in, and then three hours in, it just reached the point where I was like, ‘UCLA knows this is happening, and they don’t care enough to protect their students.’”
“I thought I was going to die,” recalled another. “I thought I’d never see my family again.”
Step 6. Call the cops. Incite a riot.
Again and again, administrators have turned to the baton-wielding arm of the law to sweep Gaza solidarity encampments off school grounds. In calling the riot squads out on their own students, they have launched the most wide-reaching crackdown on campus protest in more than half a century, with some 3,000 arrests and still counting.
The military-style raid on Columbia’s Morningside campus, on April 30th, was just one case in point. It was one I watched unfold with my own eyes a few paces from occupied Hamilton Hall (or “Hind’s Hall“). It started with a group of students linking arms and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and ended with 112 arrests and one gunshot fired from an officer’s Glock 19.
First, I watched three drones surveil the protesters from above, while a veritable army of beat cops, clad in riot gear, surrounded them on all sides. Next, I saw paramilitary squads with names like Emergency Service Unit and Strategic Response Group, backed by an armored BearCat, stage an invasion of the Columbia campus, while their counterparts laid siege to nearby City College.
In the end, law enforcement unleashed a full “use-of-force continuum” on students and workers, including that live bullet that “unintentionally” discharged from a sergeant’s service weapon “into the office they were attempting to gain access to.” Said one officer to another: “Thought we fucking shot someone.”
And Columbia was but the tip of the spear. A similar pattern has played out on campuses across the country. At Emory University, a Gaza solidarity camp was met with stun guns and rubber bullets; at Indiana and Ohio State universities, the police response included snipers on the rooftops of campus buildings; and at the University of Texas, gun-toting troopers enforced Governor Greg Abbott’s directive that “no encampments will be allowed.”
Step 7. Wage information warfare.
In most, if not all, American cities and college towns with such protests, the police, pundits, and elected officials alike have doubled down on their defense of Repress U., while vilifying the student movement in the media. In doing so, they’ve engaged in the kinds of “coordinated information activities” typical of a classical counterinsurgency campaign.
It began with House Republicans like Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who dubbed the student protesters a “pro-Hamas mob,” and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who called them “lawless agitators and radicals.” Donald Trump took it a step further, claiming that “many of them aren’t even students, and many of them come from foreign countries. Thousands and thousands are from foreign countries… I’m like, ‘Where did these people come from?’”
Novel conspiracy theories, blaming the outbreak of campus protests on groups ranging from Hamas to Antifa (or even Jewish billionaire George Soros), have reverberated across the echo chambers of the right. But the agitprop didn’t stop at the far-right fringe. Democratic officials have since taken it up, too, with New York Mayor Eric Adams leading the charge: “What should have been a peaceful protest has been coopted by professional outside agitators.”
Within 24 hours of the raids on Columbia and CCNY, the New York Police Department had, in fact, produced its own live-action propaganda from the scene of the crime, concluding with these words of warning: “To any other individuals that wanna protest… If you’re thinking about setting up tents anyplace else… think again. We’ll come there. We’ll strike you. Take you to jail like we did over here.”
This is the future envisioned for America’s college campuses by the partisans of Repress U. It’s a future where what passes for “homeland security” takes precedence over higher learning, where order prevails over inquiry, and where counterinsurgency comes before community. Then again, the next generation — the one behind the “People’s University” protests — may well have other plans.
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Representative Virginia Foxx is quoted here saying “American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.” Just who owns the universities if not the students and faculty? Without the students whose education is the function of the institution, and for which students pay extortionate amounts as well as the teachers who actually teach, there would be no university. It certainly cannot be the administration as they are the least important part of those institutions. I think that the various officials – educational, legal, and governmental – have all shown themselves to be hubristic, self centered, control freaks.
JBird4049
Not to be too irreverent, but whenever I see the name Virginia Foxx, or watch her wagging her finger at all of us sinners in various videos, I recall the sainted figure of Redd Foxx.
I’ll take Redd Foxx any day over his melanin-deprived cousin.
This was also my reaction. Who else, but for the students, do educational institutions exist, and deserve to claim tax-exempt status?
Man. How easily the descent to authoritarian State control proceeds. And Biden characterizes the protests as violent, and thus deserving of State violence. None of these people get it, none can read the writing on the wall, written by the young people of this country. Fewer than a quarter of those under 30 have a favorable view of the Israeli government (February 2024 Pew poll). Gee, I wonder why.
We should not be surprised by these actions. The students’ right of free speech, given to us under Divine Right and protected under the1st Amendment, like that of us citizens are ignored and suppressed by tyrannical leaders/governments bowing to their donors.
The insurmountable debt, endless wars and loss of freedoms for which we citizens PAY the COST was magnified with significant evidence when the pandemic restrictions lost all logic because of the fear campaign AGAINST citizens. Untold loss of income/jobs, locking people up in homes forcing many souls into despair and loneliness, not allowing us to BREATHE except through masks at first designed to do nothing and then improperly ill fitted ones, disallowing any remedy to heal from the virus (ivermectin), forcing unproven injections into many, including CHILDREN, and so much more to ‘keep us safe’. Should we not expect this when I a regime is spiraling down.
Need I remind anyone that ‘slicing the cake’ is an effective divisive strategy? If people can be convinced to hate a group, they can be put down effectively by both the citizens (through propaganda) and centralized government violence. Does anyone remember those evil anti-vaxers? This is a well-honed design used by many a tyrannical regime to turn the population against one another while slowly degrading our rights given to us by our Creator.
This executive order signed in 2021, shows the intent of our government, read carefully who they believe the enemy may be and understand when you and I will be next:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/15/fact-sheet-national-strategy-for-countering-domestic-terrorism/
Pray.
Well, their religion is Neoliberalism and their god is Mammon or the worship of wealth, which does explain their emptiness of soul.
Although the situation was not quite so extreme (the student movement was indeed silly and often pointlessly violent and the media was quite sympathetic to the students because they could be used as a stick with which to beat the government) some of the same sort of thing happened in South Africa in 2016 during the “Rhodes Must Fall” and “Fees Must Fall” movement.
The upshot has been a disaster for South African universities, where the quality and legitimacy of university governance collapsed and the general authority of universities, except as sources of ruling-class propaganda, dissipated while the quality of education collapsed along with the self-image of faculty members. I suspect the same will happen in the US. Not that it wasn’t happening already in both cases.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/opinion/south-africas-student-revolt.html
October 26, 2015
South Africa’s Student Revolt
By Nicky Falkof
JOHANNESBURG — Last Wednesday, I arrived at the University of the Witwatersrand, where I work, and couldn’t get inside. Some major entrances to the campus in the center of Johannesburg were locked. Others had been barricaded by students. The university had expected a docile, two-hour protest; instead, a week before exams, the campus was shut down by a crowd of 2,000. It’s been closed ever since.
Students at Wits, as it’s known locally, are protesting because the poor are being priced out of higher education. For many of them, getting into a university is a triumph; but staying there is a miracle.
Neither universities nor the government are doing nearly enough to help poor (which generally means black) students survive and graduate. The original impetus for the protests was a proposed 10.5-percent fee increase that would have locked some students out for life. A 10,000-rand (about $750) up-front fee would have prevented many existing students from registering and caused them to lose access to whatever funding or scholarships they had. In just one week, student demands evolved from canceling fee increases at Wits to a government commitment to publicly funded higher education (the government studied such a reform in 2012 but never released its findings to the public).
On Friday President Jacob Zuma announced that there would be no fee increases in 2016. This is a significant victory but it’s only the start of a larger struggle. The government has not committed to cover the shortfalls that universities will face or explained how it plans to fund higher education in the longer term. On Saturday, Wits students voted to continue the shutdown until the government addresses their demand for free education.
These issues are real for students like Lebo, a 19-year-old black woman in her second year at Wits. She wakes up at around 5 a.m. each morning to take a packed minibus taxi from her township to the center of the city. From there she’ll take another minibus to campus, or walk if money is tight. She’ll bring leftovers, and if there aren’t any she won’t eat all day, because food on campus is expensive. She’ll also stand in line for the computer lab for at least half an hour. When Internet is only available on your phone and your only computer access is on campus, you make your essay-writing time count. By afternoon she’ll be hungry and tired, facing the long commute to a one-bedroom home shared with her grandmother and two sisters.
Lebo is not unusual. At Wits there are 10,000 students on financial aid and many more who are struggling but aren’t quite poor enough to merit state assistance. Close to 500,000 university students nationally, just under half of those enrolled, receive official state loans, which leaves many with fee shortfalls and little for living expenses.
Across the country, university students and their families are still feeling the legacies of apartheid’s poverty trap, which provided guaranteed jobs for whites and set up a substandard educational system for blacks designed to create a low-skilled, low-paid work force. Black students were prohibited from attending elite universities, and only a few well-connected black families could afford private schooling. Twenty years has not been enough to alter that, especially coupled with the abject failure of the African National Congress to provide decent primary and secondary education…
Nicky Falkof is the head of the Media Studies Department at the University of the Witwatersrand.
“The fast, determined, and aggressive response to widespread campus protests against genocide demonstrates how our purported leaders are so insecure in their hold on power that they over-react against perceived threats”
Note that this behavior also applies to efforts to unionize workers.
Note that this behavior has been used against environmental activists and was on full display against the water protectors in the Dakotas a couple of years back.
The U S of A is in a period of all-McCarthyism-all-the-time. It is scoundrel time.
The insecurity doesn’t mean that the looting and pillaging will stop. After all, Nancy Pelosi, who has never worked in the private sector so far as I know, and is now worth some 100 million bucks, thinks that we’re all capitalists now. The pier of genocide, now floating off the cost of Palestine, will be presented as another triumph of the City on the Hill.
And voting for the decrepit party of property, the Mauves/Aquas, is a form of self-laceration. Don’t do it.
Bush made alot suppressed security law but Obama made it worse and permanent. I have also notice he did get away with these laws because he was Democrat. USA have become dangerous entity for democracy world wide, any time real democracy happen in any country usa try to take out that government by anymeans necessary. Lesser of two evil voting is coming back to bite these voters
I would go so far as to suggest that there is an 8th step – infiltration. So you would have young agents of the FBI or Homeland security or whatever start at college. Their job would be twofold. The first would be to spot the troublemakers i.e. anybody that does not buy the narrative, and to have via channels their lives made difficult through the admin of that college. Their second job would be to see who could be selected for “advancement”. They would be quietly pulled aside by a member of the faculty who would point out the advantages of being a “team player”. That obstacles would be removed from their path and advancement would be very rapid. I can think of one or two people who had extremely rapid advancement for unknown reasons, even if they made a dog’s breakfast of their job. For those agents life would be good as they would be at college where they would be really studying subjects for their law enforcement careers while attending other courses where they would be guaranteed a passing mark as a form of disguise. When their college “career” finally finishes, another agent would start the following year.
The Scientologists under the Hubbard Regency infiltrated the IRS to gain early warning concerning IRS actions against that “Church.” It worked for quite some time. If I remember correctly, Scientology “moles” got to higher middle management positions within the agency. Curious that there is a close equivalence between a “religious” cult and a “political” cult.
False flag operations to discredit dissent are also part and parcel of police activities.
False flag operations to discredit dissent are also part and parcel of police activities.
Related, from NY magazine Intelligencer. Comparing anti-Apartheid actions of students in the 80s to today’s activism opposing genocide and zionism.
Why Universities Have Started Arresting Student Protesters
I would argue that most of the contemporary ‘academic left’ are not left at all, but rather authoritarians who use superficial identity politics to distract from the core issues. Back in the day, leftists talked about the overthrow of the capitalist state and the abolition of private property etc. The superficial left (what the CIA calls “the compatible left”) are mostly right-wing authoritarians and hypocrites, but that is part of the culture now.
The hard-core, old-school left have largely been purged. (see: COINTELPRO)
I am reading C.J. Sansom’s “Tombland,” his final published novel in the Tudor lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, series. It finds Matthew in Norwich, England, on business for his employer, the Lady Elizabeth, where he becomes caught up in Kett’s Rebellion. Matthew and Robert Kett, small landholders, led an uprising of an estimated 15,000 commoners, in 1549, composed mainly of people who had been cast off due to the enclosures of common land by the land-owning aristocracy (the original 1%.) That and inflation. And rising rents. And poor people being hanged for stealing bread while a noble could get a Royal pardon after being convicted of murder.
Sansom’s description of the camp set up on Household Heath, outside of Norwich, where thousands of commoners organized, conducted business, fed and ruled themselves, reminded me of the days of Occupy.
It’s all going to end in disaster for the commoners. The rulers have all the guns. And England will grind on in its transformation from an agrarian feudal society to an industrialized capitalistic one.
eldest and i accidentally fell into a very long discussion the other evening(til midnight!) when he said something about seeing feudalism everywhere he looked.
we covered the decline and fall of rome, the pelopponesian war, the long senescence of the ottomans, the bronze age collapse, Livy…and Good Niccolo’s treatment thereof…(where i got to hold forth about the Conflict of the Orders), and other sundry and related topics.
he’s already…and independently…in agreement regarding the declining usaempire, inc.
so we gamed out what could potentially happen right here, in the texas hill country, when the trucks stop running, dollar hegemony has ended, the imperium pulls back from internal peripheral places like here…etc.
a motif he repeated several times throughout was that he just doesnt talk about economics or politics…or even history…with most all the people he interacts with.(ie: self-censorship…to avoid hassle)
this, without even being aware of these campus protests.
or various other attempts to curtail speech in the last 25 years.
that he has arrived there, on his own, says a lot, i think.
i told him i was intending to paint “thought criminal” very discreetly on the partial headache rack behind the cab of my truck…so he sez…in the second such shock to me…”why?…rednecks’ll be putting dogshit in yer seat…”
it was too late…and we had killed the beer by then…to launch into a passionate, periclean speech in defense of the First Amendment.
perhaps next time.
I’m just pleased that he’s thinking…and well outside the usual box.
Congratulations, Amfortas.
A lot of the credit has to be for you.
It is interesting that the forces of order are much better organized and equipped when dealing with domestic disorder than they are at disorder in foreign countries.
It’s not like those billionaire donors are the only ones funding these universities. If you pay 100k per year to send your child to Columbia which then mistreats them, takes away their rights and tries to ruin their future lives don’t you as a ‘stakeholder’ have the right too sue the crap out of such a decadent and fraudulent institution? Undoubtedly the fine print says no but if our supposedly neutral and beneficial education institutions are under the thumb of a foreign power then something is more than rotten in Denmark. A recent interview with Israelis over the ICC had one saying “we are not a banana republic.”
No, that’s America’s job.
Some of us who have always had a somewhat jaded attitude toward higher education might say toldja so but we are not the stakeholders in question. It’s time for America’s ruling class to wake up.
As RevKev noted above, infiltration (and co-optation) is all part of the playbook. Most of this is nothing new, as Yves points out re: Occupy. Also, the protests on UC campuses in ’09 and ’11 were met with brutal violence, and retribution for simply protesting austerity, kleptocracy and forcing faculty to do work without getting paid for it etc. etc. (most faculty are now “adjunct”, part-time, no benefits)
All of this smacks of COINTELPRO, which laid the groundwork decades ago. Wikipedia is not reliable, but can at least give a background if not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
The Israelis (including dual citizens) do their part to infiltrate campuses as well. https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-formed-a-task-force-to-carry-out-covert-campaigns-at-us-universities/
I am sure glad that I am semi-retired and no longer have to worry about what I say, write, do, teach on a US campus. Otherwise, I could be beaten, arrested, fired and blacklisted. Land of the _______, home of the _______.
aye.
ive related many times in these pages that the various versions of US Army Field Manuals regarding “Counterinsurgency” and “Counter Revolution” and the like are well worth the time of anyone who is taken aback by the sort of sawtoothed decline into authoritarianism in this country.
also The Jakarta Method, etc….
its all there.
and remember the fbi was created to root out commies….all that high fallutin stuff about saving kidnapped babies and such was an afterthought.
Film maker Yance Ford has made a new documentary called Power which is distributed by Netflix. It examines the historical role of police and why “violence is part and parcel” of U.S. policing. Ford was interviewed by Democracy Now on May 23rd, 2024. Repression and reestablishing order is the norm throughout US history.
What is crystal clear for a lot of people is the fact that for the US elites/governemt(s), the population is the potential enemy, and no means will be spared to corrall the “unruly mob”.
Including ” gun control” .