Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses

the other mike

Diamond Member
Jan 5, 2019
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Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses
Many of us are deeply concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings and hate crimes that have taken place across the United States. As the Department of Justice reported, in 2018 alone there were 25 race-based terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, each committed by an alleged white supremacist. Immediate action is needed to address this crisis and tragedies like the Aug. 3 shooting in El Paso, Texas.

So I read with interest a recent press release of Rep. Michael McCaul—the Republican incumbent in the Texas 10th Congressional District and my opponent in the 2018 election—in which he announced a new bill to respond to domestic terrorism.

My hopes for reasonable legislation were quickly dashed, however, and replaced by deep concern.

(snip)
The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence.

In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist.

If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.


Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses

Wait there's more.
From May, 2019

You could get prison time for protesting a pipeline in Texas—even if it’s on your land
 
Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses
Many of us are deeply concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings and hate crimes that have taken place across the United States. As the Department of Justice reported, in 2018 alone there were 25 race-based terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, each committed by an alleged white supremacist. Immediate action is needed to address this crisis and tragedies like the Aug. 3 shooting in El Paso, Texas.

So I read with interest a recent press release of Rep. Michael McCaul—the Republican incumbent in the Texas 10th Congressional District and my opponent in the 2018 election—in which he announced a new bill to respond to domestic terrorism.

My hopes for reasonable legislation were quickly dashed, however, and replaced by deep concern.

(snip)
The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence.

In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist.

If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.


Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses

Wait there's more.
From May, 2019

You could get prison time for protesting a pipeline in Texas—even if it’s on your land
Cry me a river.

The ADL is completely deplatforming the entire right wing.
 
Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses
Many of us are deeply concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings and hate crimes that have taken place across the United States. As the Department of Justice reported, in 2018 alone there were 25 race-based terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, each committed by an alleged white supremacist. Immediate action is needed to address this crisis and tragedies like the Aug. 3 shooting in El Paso, Texas.

So I read with interest a recent press release of Rep. Michael McCaul—the Republican incumbent in the Texas 10th Congressional District and my opponent in the 2018 election—in which he announced a new bill to respond to domestic terrorism.

My hopes for reasonable legislation were quickly dashed, however, and replaced by deep concern.

(snip)
The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence.

In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist.

If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.


Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses

Wait there's more.
From May, 2019

You could get prison time for protesting a pipeline in Texas—even if it’s on your land


It's a good thing that republican is in the minority in the House and that bill will go nowhere.
 
The McCaul bill mirrors this approach, and creates major federal crimes for property damage connected to a political cause.

For all of the crimes in question, from murder to vandalism, existing penal codes give prosecutors ample room to bring cases. Nothing is stopping federal authorities from charging mass shooters with hate crimes or crimes of violence and seeking sentences up to and including life in prison and the death penalty.

But there is currently no law that would empower federal prosecutors to charge protesters with major federal crimes for property damage caused during a protest.

While this bill is rolled out, President Trump is ranting daily against “antifa” (i.e., anti-fascists). Recent news footage showed clashes in Portland, Ore., between white supremacist groups and anti-fascist demonstrators. Were those confrontations tantamount to domestic terrorism? The McCaul bill would give federal prosecutors near blanket authority to charge either group with terrorist charges. And Trump has already made clear which group he would focus on.

There are countless examples of protest activity that McCaul would open to terrorism charges. As for Bree Newsome Bass, who scaled a flagpole in Charleston, S.C., to remove a Confederate flag? She’d be considered a terrorist. Students at Duke University who toppled a Confederate monument? Also terrorists.

Under this definition, the Boston Tea Party itself was a terrorist act: “Property damage, with the intent to influence a government policy.”

This is not the way we reduce mass shootings in America. This is not a tool to confront white supremacist attacks. Rather, this is an open invitation to trample the Constitution and give free reign to a dictatorial regime.
 
#7: the property damage connected to a political cause is Antifa's modus operandi when it shows up as a reactionary force at protests. Antifa's moral materialism smells fishy (its take on whether or not the destruction of property is moral). Nazism is morality itself. Worse, the accelerated intensity of the signifier "terrorist" is a classic piece of opportunism that will produce even more fascism and repression, where all the prisoners become "taxed" by one or several groups representing opposition to authority, as this morphs into written law. Go Boston!
 
For the pertinent passages, one must see Nick Land's Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring Production, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, circa 1995 or so. We'll see if we can retrieve the article, because Antifa's curious relationship to material objects is suspicious, especially since they are supposedly anti-fascist. For instance, in one report, Antifa themselves have linked the concept of morality to inanimate objects.
 
Why does anti-fascism seem like fascism?

6 Sept 2017 Hitler's 'Brown Shirts' Was Oddly Similar to Antifa's Tactics and Methods Today -- The Rise of Antifa Nazism
eugenics.news/2017-09-06-hitlers-brown-shirts-were-oddly-similar-to-antifas-tactics-and-methods-today-the-rise-of-antifa-nazism.html
(URL may or may not be functional in this post)

Nick Land's excerpt:

'Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification. Nazism might even be characterized as the pure politics of effort; the absolute dominion of the collective super-ego in its annihilating rigor. Nothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is morality itself; heir to Europe's respectable history; that of witch-burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction; the same desire for repression -- organized in terms of the disapproving gaze of the father -- that Anti-Oedipus analyzes with such power. Who could imagine Nazism without daddy? and who could imagine daddy being pre-figured in the energetic unconscious? Death is too simple, too fluid, too disdainful of races and fatherlands to have anything much to do with the Nazis. Ressentiment was something they knew about, as was the aspiration to a mythic sacrifice, a Gotterdaemmerung that would inscribe them in the history books.'
(Land N, Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring Production, JBSP 24 (1) [1993] pp. 66-76)

Land's 'moral case against Nazism' links to Antifa here, and notice the moral argument and inanimate "Freudian slip" in the discourse between subject and object:

18 Aug 2017 Unmasking Antifa Movement: Activists Seek Peace Through Violence
floppingaces.net/2017/08/20/the-left-the-media-and-rinos-antifas-useful-idiots
'....They don't hesitate to destroy property: "Violence against windows - there's no such thing as violence against windows," a masked antifa member in Union Square told CNN. "Windows don't have - they're not persons. And even when they are persons, the people we fight back against are evil. They are the living embodiment, they are the second coming of Hitler."....Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.

17 Aug 2017 Republicans Embrace Movement That Wants To Destroy Them
dailycaller.com/2017/08/17-republicans-embrace-group-that-wants-to-destroy-them/
'....Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney argued violent leftists were morally righteous. "No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes," Romney tweeted Tuesday night. "When entire movement built on anger and hatred towards people different than you, it justifies and ultimately leads to violence against them," the Senator stated in his ill-formed tweet.
....
Arizona Senator John McCain - who fought and was tortured by communists in Vietnam - claimed that violent leftists are great Americans fighting against hate. "There's no moral equivalence between racists and Americans standing up to defy hate and bigotry. The President of the United States should say so," McCain tweeted.....It is very odd that Republicans are so eager to absolve Antifa of any blame for what occurred in Charlottesville, and to further praise them as anti-hate heroes.....Why do Antifa continue to attack Muslims?'

In contrast, the Antifa in St. Paul were defending Muslims against anti-sharia activism.
 
Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses
Many of us are deeply concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings and hate crimes that have taken place across the United States. As the Department of Justice reported, in 2018 alone there were 25 race-based terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, each committed by an alleged white supremacist. Immediate action is needed to address this crisis and tragedies like the Aug. 3 shooting in El Paso, Texas.

So I read with interest a recent press release of Rep. Michael McCaul—the Republican incumbent in the Texas 10th Congressional District and my opponent in the 2018 election—in which he announced a new bill to respond to domestic terrorism.

My hopes for reasonable legislation were quickly dashed, however, and replaced by deep concern.

(snip)
The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence.

In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist.

If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.


Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses

Wait there's more.
From May, 2019

You could get prison time for protesting a pipeline in Texas—even if it’s on your land
Cry me a river.

The ADL is completely deplatforming the entire right wing.
Wow look at you wanting dissent to be a jailable offense for 25 years, because you're being a crying little bitch about youtube and twitter. Christ. This country deserves whatever happens to it.
 
Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses
Many of us are deeply concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings and hate crimes that have taken place across the United States. As the Department of Justice reported, in 2018 alone there were 25 race-based terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, each committed by an alleged white supremacist. Immediate action is needed to address this crisis and tragedies like the Aug. 3 shooting in El Paso, Texas.

So I read with interest a recent press release of Rep. Michael McCaul—the Republican incumbent in the Texas 10th Congressional District and my opponent in the 2018 election—in which he announced a new bill to respond to domestic terrorism.

My hopes for reasonable legislation were quickly dashed, however, and replaced by deep concern.

(snip)
The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence.

In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist.

If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.


Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses

Wait there's more.
From May, 2019

You could get prison time for protesting a pipeline in Texas—even if it’s on your land
Dissent is protected expression, destruction of property and physically attacking people are crimes and our current statutes are sufficient, they simply need to be enforced.

Pipeline Protest Will Cost Democrats’ Minn.

We tire of their crazed lawlessness.

This is the next Dakota Access or Keystone XL fight and just in time for the 2020 election. Democratic contender Commie Bernie Sanders jumped into the debate early on by releasing a video in January opposing Line 3, and just last week Fauxcohantus Warren came out against the pipeline in a tweet prior to her rally in St. Paul, which drew criticism from local construction union members.

Just as we saw with Warren, Democrats need to be cautious about blindly joining this fight for a few important reasons. First, the project is supported by local labor unions and leaders, as well as lawmakers in both parties in the state. Second, as we’ve seen from past protests over pipelines, they usually have a costly and negative impact on local residents, taxpayers, law enforcement and government – and therefore a negative impact on any politician who is supporting the protests.

Finally, Democratic candidates wading into the issue are automatically aligning themselves with the organizations that are leading the battle. For example, organizations such as Honor the Earth, which led the Dakota protests, are already planning events to prevent the pipeline from being rebuilt in Minnesota. On the surface, it might not seem like the kind of group a Democratic candidate needs to be wary of, but there are questions about its funding and authenticity that could have repercussions.
 

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