“No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.” So reads the subhead of veteran journalist Glenn Greenwald’s latest article, titled The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming.
In the two-and-a-half months since the presidential election, events have seemingly moved at warp speed. Supporters of then-President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in protest of the election results, the Left has moved in blatant fashion to crack down on the rights of conservatives, including Twitter’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump’s account and more than 70 others, and Amazon has de-platformed the right-leaning website, Parler.
As Greenwald sees it, we conservatives ain’t seen nothin’, yet.
“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 twenty 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.
Greenwald then ticked through some of the specifics behind his belief that the war on conservatism is only going to worsen.
“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.”
And then, the chilling reality we’re already seeing; if we dare to question the Left’s crackdown on conservatives and conservative thought, it is us who are guilty, us who are to be punished or silenced for questioning the Left’s moral responsibility to do whatever the hell it wants to do — no questions allowed.
“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 version of John Ashcroft [former senator and attorney general under George H.W. Bush] look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU.
Greenwald cited comments by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal — for years, head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of the war in Afghanistan — who explicitly compared that coming war on domestic terrorism to real war on terrorism.
“I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence.
“This is now happening in America. […] I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.”
As conservatives, we grouse about the suspension of Trump’s Twitter account; we wring our hands over the de-platforming of Parler — but we pretty much go about our normal lives, most of us doing little more than arguing with liberals and others on Facebook or Twitter.
“Anyone who, despite all this, still harbors lingering doubts that the Capitol riot is and will be the neoliberal 9/11, and that a new War on Terror is being implemented in its name,” wrote Greenwald, “need only watch the two short video clips below, which will clear their doubts for good.”
The first video is from a recent — and typical — episode of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Mika Brzinski. [sarc] It features Jeremy Bash, who worked for the CIA and the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
In reference to the storming of the Capitol, Bash demands that “we reset our entire intelligence approach,” including “look[ing] at greater surveillance of them,” adding: “The FBI is going to have to run confidential sources.”
“See if you detect any differences between what CIA operatives and neocons were saying in 2002 when demanding the Patriot Act and greater FBI and NSA surveillance,” suggested Greenwald, “and what this CIA-official-turned-NBC-News-analyst is saying here:
In the second video, former Facebook security official Alex Stamos told CNN’s petulant Mini-Me Brian Stelter that social media companies need to employ the same tactics against U.S. citizens that they used to remove ISIS from the internet — “in collaboration with law enforcement” — and that those tactics should be directly aimed at what Stamos calls “extremist conservative influencers.”
Stamos inadvertently noted the “real problem” for the Left:
“’There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger audience than people on daytime CNN’ — and it’s time for CNN and other mainstream outlets to seize the monopoly on information dissemination to which they are divinely entitled by taking away the platforms of those whom people actually want to watch and listen to:
And there it is. CNN and MSNBC cannot compete with conservative thought-sharing on social media in an honest way — so, obviously, in the collective minds of the Left, conservative content must be suppressed — or better yet, “canceled” in its entirety.
Greenwald provided the following examples of the seriousness of the Left’s effort.
“Calls for a War on Terror sequel — a domestic version complete with surveillance and censorship — are not confined to ratings-deprived cable hosts and ghouls from the security state. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
“Meanwhile, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) — not just one of the most dishonest members of Congress but also one of the most militaristic and authoritarian — has had a bill proposed since 2019 to simply amend the existing foreign anti-terrorism bill to allow the U.S. Government to invoke exactly the same powers at home against “domestic terrorists.”
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla fame, said it best, earlier this month.
‘West Coast high tech’ has anointed itself the “de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk said, and then he nailed it, in terms of what’s really behind Big Tech censorship and suppression of conservative content.
“There is a distinction between banning ‘hate speech and banning ‘speech you hate.'”
That is the reality of the Left’s war on conservatism. It must be defeated. America as we know it is on the line.
Check out my RedState colleague Brandon Morse’s below article on Greenwald’s Wednesday appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” in which he reiterated his warnings about the coming war on “domestic terrorism.”
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