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Oct. 13, 2024 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:05:35
Flashback: Glenn Retraces the 30-Year Domestic War on Civil Liberties that Launched Gore Vidal’s Political Transformation

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to his credit. These girls, they came, they shared their opinions, they shared their thoughts.
And it's like Isaac said, I do this for a living. I express my opinion for a living.
I think it was more casual for them. But I appreciate it coming on. I thought it was a good conversation. And it's good to flesh out the topics. I think they represent what everybody thinks about the issues. I think in that way, it was balanced. I represent kind of the opposite view.
And I'm really not trying to score slam dunks and say, oh, well, I got you in my trap. I'm trying to get people to think about a totally different way of thinking in the sense that you could see so much of the talk is, well, everyone should vote.
But in particular, the way in which these U.S. security state agencies have been weaponized, particularly in the Trump years, to target increasingly domestic dissent.
Seemingly, every week brings a new story about the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security trying to censor the Internet.
Everyone has rights. Women have rights.
Everybody has these unexamined assumptions about how the world is and how it should be.
Monitoring and surveilling the political opponents of the Biden administration and of the neoliberal order that runs the United States.
And in general, looking for ways to try and criminalize, suppress, outlaw and punish all forms of political dissent.
And just to highlight how true that is, I want to show you a couple of stories just from the last couple of days that illustrate what a grave crisis this has really become.
In order to then put this into its historical context and to really try and understand the roots of where this came from.
Earlier this week, the news site Newsweek, on October 5th, published an investigation, an exclusive investigation by a reporter named William Arkin, who has spent his entire life within establishment media organizations in 2011.
He published one of the most important investigative series on the U.S. security state entitled Top Secret America, which he co-authored with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest.
And it was really that article that in a lot of ways spurred my interest in the NSA and that led to the Snowden reporting.
It talked about how there was a sprawling secret part of the government that was completely unaccountable and that was so big that no one could understand.
And Bill Arkin is the author of this new investigation in Newsweek entitled, Exclusive Donald Trump Followers Are Targeted by the FBI. As the 2024 election nears.
In other words, this is not Fox News claiming the FBI is being weaponized against Trump supporters, nor is it a right-wing site.
This is a journalist who has been an investigative reporter inside the most mainstream organizations his entire life who is now reporting this.
And what he wrote is the following, quote, The federal government believes the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that That it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter.
Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.
The FBI is in an almost impossible position, says a current FBI official who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters.
The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, but the Bureau must also preserve the constitutional rights of all Americans to campaign, speak freely, and protest the government.
By focusing on former President Trump and his MAGA supporters, the official said, the bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.
What the FBI data shows, from the president down the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.
Quote, Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country, President Biden tweeted last September.
The first time he explicitly singled out the former president, quote, modern Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections, but elections being held now and into the future, Biden said.
There are so many reasons that should disturb everybody.
That is not the role of the FBI to decide which political ideologies are sufficiently threatening That American citizens who are not found to have engaged in any violence or engaged in any illegality should be tracked and monitored.
But we of course know that this is exactly what the U.S. security state is being used for because they really do believe the neoliberal order does The kind of bipartisan establishment wings of both parties that anyone who is a critic of the establishment in any kind of ineffective way is somebody who is a threat, somebody who is a danger. Not just a threat or a danger, but the primary threat, the primary danger.
They see domestic dissidents and what they call domestic extremists as the greatest threat to the American homeland and national security.
Not ISIS, not Al-Qaeda, not foreign terrorist groups, not Russia.
And that is where the bulk of their powers and their budget are being directed inward, internally, domestically for domestic dissent.
Now, no viewers of this program think that's hyperbole.
We've reported on the Fifth Circuit's decision just a month ago.
That the Biden administration is responsible for one of the gravest assaults of the First Amendment in decades, if not in the history of the judiciary, by constantly pressuring social media companies using the FBI and Homeland Security and the CIA and the CDC to censor political speech the Biden administration thinks is dangerous and it dislikes.
That's, of course, something we report on frequently.
But to really understand their real mindset I think it's really worth looking at a clip of an interview given to CNN's Christiane Amanpour this week by Hillary Clinton, who in a lot of ways has become the id of American liberalism.
She's the person who says the things liberals really believe and that they really think, but they know better to admit publicly that they believe.
But she's so bitter about the 2016 election and her defeat there still, in fact, more bitter than ever, That she has no internal filter.
And she just says what liberals really think about their political enemies.
That's of course where her notorious phrase basket of deplorables came from.
Looking down her nose at Trump supporters and saying how they're just irredeemably bad people.
That of course is what liberals think about their political opponents.
And here she is today, or yesterday on CNN, saying that she thinks the Trump movement is a cult that needs to be deprogrammed.
Listen to what she said. Very strong partisans in both parties in the past.
And we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things.
Gun control and climate change and the economy and taxes.
But there wasn't this little tale of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today.
And sadly, so many of those extremists, those mega extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure.
He's only in it for himself.
He's now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions.
And when do they break with him?
You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.
As you see there, Kristina Amonpour kind of chuckled, thinking she was deliberately using hyperbole, but she didn't laugh at all.
She meant that. She thinks there should be a formal re-education, a formal deprogramming of Trump supporters.
That is increasingly how establishment liberals see People who support Donald Trump or support his set of beliefs, not as citizens exercising their rights to free thought and free speech and free political organization, but as criminals, as people who are sick, who need to be monitored and surveilled and deprogrammed and reeducated.
And this is what they all think.
She just is the only one in her bitterness willing to say it.
Now, As I said, the war on terror over the last 20 years created this impression that the CIA, Homeland Security, the NSA were primarily focused on foreign threats and not domestic ones.
And so it seems like it's this new pathology that these U.S. security state agencies are so focused instead on domestic politics, but that really isn't true.
The first report that we did that initiated the Snowden reporting was one that proved the NSA was collecting massive dossiers on American citizens, including all of their phone records, collecting with whom people were speaking, for how long, where they were when they were speaking.
And they were doing it in mass by the millions, not people who were suspected of any wrongdoing, just monitoring the entire population domestically.
But a major part of the war on terror, even though it was constantly talked about as a war against foreign threats, was focused domestically.
That's obviously what the Patriot Act was.
Which ended up getting used in far more domestic cases and domestic investigations than it did in cases involving foreign terror threats.
But the entire edifice of the war on terror ended up, once it eroded, being directed inward.
So many of the techniques and the weapons that were developed and intended to be deployed in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan were instead imported into the United States.
And as a result, our law enforcement agencies here at home now resemble paramilitary forces of the kind you deploy to war zones, much more so than domestic police forces.
Here's the Atlantic in 2011.
Reporting on just one of the many programs that militarized the U.S. security state here at home, it was entitled, How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police.
Quote, Over the past 10 years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers.
Here's why we should be alarmed.
Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared a war on terrorism, there has been a crucial yet often unrecognized shift in United States policy.
Before 9-11, law enforcement possessed primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States.
Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear.
This shift appears to be permanent.
In 2006, the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had, quote, broken old orthodoxies that once confined are counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.
In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculque a soldier's mentality among their ranks.
Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seems obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.
Undoubtedly, American police departments have substantially increased their use of military-grade equipment and weaponry, To perform their counter-terrorism duties, adopting everything from body armor to, in some cases, attack helicopters.
The logic behind this is understandable.
If superior military-grade equipment helps the police catch more criminals and avert or at least reduce the threat of a domestic terrorist attack, then we ought to deem it an instance of positive sharing of technology, right?
Not necessarily. Indeed, experts in the legal community have raised serious concerns that allowing law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers.
The establishment knows, as much as you do, that anti-establishment sentiment is at an all-time high.
It's been growing for years.
People don't trust establishment institutions of authority in the United States.
They don't like them. They feel hostile toward them.
They feel attacked by them.
And the remedy that has been adopted for that is to militarize the U.S. security state, to turn it into a weapon against the American people, to intimidate the population domestically, to know that if you try and exercise your rights of dissent, if you try and protest or organize, you're going to be surveilled, you're going to be monitored, you're going to be Criminalized and prosecuted and if it comes down to it and you present enough of a threat, you will be crushed.
That is what the abuse of the U.S. security state is about, controlling every aspect of domestic politics in exactly the way it was never supposed to.
And what is happening now is a mirror image of what happened in the 1990s.
Under the Clinton administration, when the left and American liberals started putting all their faith and trust in the FBI and these other law enforcement agencies because they were told the real threat America faces is not a foreign threat but one from domestic extremists, from anti-government extremists, from people who were opposed to the political establishment and the federal government.
And even before The domestic terrorist attack at Oklahoma City in 1995, the Clinton administration was exploiting this threat to demand all kinds of authoritarian powers and once that terrorist attack happened at Oklahoma City, then they were off to the races.
Every week, The major media outlets in the United States were hyping this threat and insisting that we needed to invest more powers in the CIA, the FBI, the NSA to stay safe.
This is where this mentality comes from, that these U.S. security agencies should be directed inward at domestic dissent.
And so you cannot understand today's crisis without understanding this decade.
And every year that goes by, I know more and more people don't know about these events because they become more and more distant historical events.
So it's really worth, even for those of you who remember it, revisiting it and using the political transformation of Gore Vidal to do so, which I find incredibly fascinating but also relevant to today.
So one of the very first events that spawned this anti-government rage Was the raid I referenced earlier at Ruby Ridge in Idaho where the Weaver family had an ideology of white separatism, of anti-government ideology that happens to be illegal in the United States.
You may not like it. You may not support it.
But you're allowed to move to Idaho to get off the grid and to decide that you want to live a life of Separation from society because you don't think society is healthy any longer.
That is your absolute right to do.
But the US government didn't think so.
They harassed the family.
They tried to prosecute them.
They tried to serve warrants on them.
And it finally led to an 11-day siege by the FBI and ATM and other agents at their ranch in Idaho.
And federal agents just killed several members of the Weaver family.
Here from the New York Times, September 1st, 1992, white supremacist surrenders after an 11-day siege.
Quote, Randy Weaver, a white supremacist whose defiance of the law made him a hero to hate groups in the West, Surrender to the authorities today, ending an 11-day siege at his mountaintop cabin in the woods of North Idaho.
The standoff, which began with two days of gunfire that killed Mr.
Weaver's 13-year-old son Samuel, his wife Vicki, And a Deputy United States Marshal, William Dogen, as well as his dog and his golden retriever, ended early this afternoon without a shot being fired.
The 44-year-old fugitive had vowed to die rather than turn himself over to the small army of federal agents, National Guard troops, And police officers who had surrounded his cabin atop Steve Cliffs in the Selkirk Mountains.
Supporters of Mr. Weaver, who tauntered and cursed the authorities for the last week, have accused them of overkill.
A fugitive for 19 months Mr.
Weaver was wanted on federal gun charges.
So, of course, the New York Times was trying to justify that.
It turned out Randy Weaver sued the government, started other people who were injured there.
They won multi-million dollar settlements.
The investigation of the FBI concluded that the FBI used reckless force.
And was essentially harassing a citizen for purely ideological ends, ended up shooting and killing members of his family unjustly.
But that was the mentality that had taken hold of the U.S. security state, that they were there not to fight foreign terrorist organizations.
At the time, Al Qaeda was very active.
They would end up attacking the World Trade Center that decade.
But they were focused, as they are now, primarily on domestic dissent.
That anti-government rage escalated severely with the hideous government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Here was the New York Times version of it.
The New York Times on April 20th, 1983.
You see a big headline there.
Apparent mass suicide ends a 51-day standoff in Texas.
And the overview there is death in Waco.
Scores die as cult compound is set afire after FBI sends in tanks with tear gas.
Apparent mass suicide ends 51-day standoff in Texas.
Quote, hours after federal agents began battering holes in the walls of the Branch Davidian compound and spraying tear gas inside, David Koresh, the leader of that group, and more than 80 followers, including at least 17 children, Apparently perished today when flames engulfed the sprawling wooden complex on the Texas prairie.
Officials of the FBI said they believe that Mr.
Koresh, a self-described messiah who prophesied to his followers that they would meet their end in an apocalyptic confrontation with the law, gave the order to burn the compound down in the 51st day of a standoff with federal agents.
FBI officials said smashing the walls and filling the building with tear gas was intended to increase pressure on the cult members, who had resisted all previous demands for surrender.
But the officials insisted that the tear gas was not flammable and that the fire was set by cult members who poured fuel around the perimeter of the compound and lit matches.
They all willingly followed.
FBI officials said they believed that 95 people were inside the compound when the fire began, including 17 children under the age of 10.
And that it only knew of the nine survivors, four of whom were at hospitals this evening and five of whom were taken to the local jail.
Now, investigations of the incident at Waco under Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno created a much different picture than the New York Times depicted.
Namely that it was almost definitely the case that the FBI agents who had seized that compound or seized it Shot canisters that caused this fire and incinerated the people inside and killed them.
And I'm going to show you Gore Vidal's attacks on the FBI in just a minute and let him express the critiques in its most eloquent form.
Critiques that got him expelled from left liberal circles where he had spent his entire life inhabiting for the crime of questioning the U.S. security state and its abuse of its power against American dissidents.
But the propaganda was that David Koresh was a threat to those children, that he was molesting them, and I guess the government decided it would be better to burn them alive and kill them, which is what the government did, Then allow that to continue.
Here is a news report from a local affiliate at the time reporting on what happened in Waco.
The flames may be out but a firestorm of controversy rages on after the assault on the Branch Davidian compound.
Officials are starting to look for answers after doomsday in Waco.
This morning investigators began sifting through the embers of the Waco compound searching for the bodies of more than 80 cult members believed killed in the fire.
In Washington, President Clinton says he gives his full support to the decisions made by the Attorney General and the FBI to end the siege.
But the family members of those killed in Waco have bitter words for those they say must bear the responsibility for needless death.
Under the blistering Texas sun, investigators comb the smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound.
More than 80 people are believed to have died in yesterday's fiery conclusion to the 51-day siege, 24 of them children.
Today, the FBI said it's not responsible for the deaths.
Those children are dead because David Koresh had them killed.
There's no question about that.
He had those fires started.
He had 51 days to release those children.
He chose those children to die.
We didn't have anything to do with their deaths.
The FBI said cult members didn't panic as tanks began to ram the compound, yet calmly, apparently under orders from Koresh, began to gather in an underground bunker and donned gas masks.
Federal agents tried to help the few people they could see, including a man clinging to the roof.
And he finally fell off the roof In exposing himself to danger, the HRT people gave out and put him out.
He was on fire and saved him.
Another woman came out who appeared to be disoriented.
She went back into the compound.
They got out and went to get her.
So there was constant communication with everybody to try to get them to come out.
Only nine people were rescued from the flames.
As to why the FBI lost its patience after weeks of waiting, law enforcement officials revealed today that they had electronic listening devices inside the compound.
Their eavesdropping led them to believe Koresh was becoming more violent and that intervention was necessary.
So again, you don't have to like these groups.
These were two groups that decided to isolate, to live by themselves.
The government couldn't tolerate that and used a lot of violence to try and end their ability to do so.
And of course you have the New York Times and most media outlets propagandizing in defense of the FBI, in defense of the government for what they did, and yet investigations revealed, as so often happens, that that was propagandistic lies.
Now, one of the outcomes of Ruby Ridge, and especially Waco, was that a former member of the military, the US military, Who concluded that the U.S. government was waging war on Americans and that what he had learned in the military taught him that it was justified to wage a war back, planted a bomb at the Oklahoma City federal courthouse and killed 157 people, including a couple dozen children, Timothy McVeigh.
And the minute that happened, the Clinton administration seized on that attack to insist that the gravest threat that the United States faced It was one of anti-government right-wing sentiment and began demanding a huge series of powers,
just like the Bush administration did after 9-11, that would have vested the Clinton administration and the U.S. government with previously unthinkable powers of surveillance and detention and monitoring, all in the name of this huge threat that they built up after Oklahoma City,
but even really before. We're good to go.
And the government engaged in a nonstop propaganda campaign about the dangers posed by domestic extremism.
Here you see the cover of Time Magazine.
Back when Time Magazine mattered in 1995.
Rise of the domestic extremists.
How dangerous are they?
An inside look at America's anti-government zealots.
They had really turned opposition to the government into a crime, saying that these people who feared the federal government, who opposed the federal government, even after seeing what they did in Ruby Ridge and Waco, were terrorists.
These were people who were not permitted to be free.
The New York Times, of course, led the way.
Here you see their Week in Review in 1995, Men at War, Inside the World of the Paranoid.
Quote, And has sprouted rage and conspiracy for generations.
One current branch leads to the right-wing militias and a worldview that Mr.
McVeigh was apparently exposed to and may have all shared in the months before the Oklahoma City blast.
Even as a Republican ascendancy has shifted political discourse rightward, the militias accept almost as an article of faith that the government has betrayed the people, that its leaders are corrupt, and that the Constitution has been subverted.
Ross Perot has said some of the same things.
But militia members and other right-wing extremists then go into another dimension, transforming frustration and alienation into a black and white world in which the forces of one world government are at the nation's doorstep and the FBI and the federal government together are bitter enemies of true patriots.
It is a world of hate and fear with a shared belief in the same sinister global forces, blinding disparate groups and individuals who have fallen under its sway.
Do you see how none of this is new?
How back then they were also attempting to say that anybody who fears the FBI, who thinks the worst of the federal government, is an extremist who ought to be stopped by the federal government.
And they immediately exploited the acts of this one person in Oklahoma City to claim that this entire movement of people who dislike the federal government and distrust of the federal government and the FBI And who saw Ruby Ridge and Waco as examples of government attempts to crush dissent were somehow not free people exercising their constitutional rights but were criminals.
Bill Clinton as his top priority repeatedly exploited Oklahoma City and all of this anti-government sentiment to demand what he called anti-terrorism powers exactly like the Bush administration did after 9-11.
Here from the New York Times in May, just a month or so after Oklahoma City, Clinton assails effort to change his anti-terrorism plan.
Quote,"...the president expressed particular concern over opposition to three of his recommendations, which would expand wiretapping authority, ease the ban on military involvement in law enforcement, and require that materials that can be used to make explosive devices be tagged with particles to make them easier to trace." But backed by a bipartisan group concerned about infringing on the civil liberties of domestic political groups,
the Republican plan does not go as far as the President wants in expanding wiretapping authority.
Mr. Clinton's public approval ratings have risen significantly since the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19th, and the White House is eager to keep the initiative on an issue that makes the President appear tough.
Mr. Clinton particularly cited his proposal to allow investigators to conduct wiretaps on suspected terrorists who move from telephone to telephone or roving taps without obtaining a new court order each time.
That's one of the things the Patriot Act ended up doing.
Quote, I don't care whether a terrorist is trying to knowingly evade the police.
I care that he or she may be trying to plant another Oklahoma City bombing, he said.
They've been after these powers for decades and they use everything and anything they can to scare people into giving it to them.
Even before Oklahoma City, the year before, the Clinton administration was demanding something called a clipper chip that would have, before the internet could even breathe, given the federal government almost ubiquitous control over it.
Also from the New York Times, June of 1994, so the year before the Oklahoma City bombing or so, the Clipper chip has promoted what might be considered the first holy war of the information highway.
That was what the internet was called at its inception, the information highway.
The cyberpunks consider the Clipper the lever that Big Brother is trying to use to pry into the conversations, messages, and transactions of the computer age.
The Clippers defenders, who are largely in the government, believe it represents the last chance to protect personal safety and national security against the developing information anarchy that fosters criminals, terrorists, and foreign foes.
HITECH has created a huge privacy gap.
But miraculously, a fix has emerged.
Cheap, easy-to-use, virtually unbreakable encryption.
Cryptography is the silver bullet by which we can hope to reclaim our privacy.
The solution, however, has one drawback.
Cryptography shields the law abiding and the lawless equally.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies contend that if the strong codes of encryption are widely available, their efforts to protect the public would be paralyzed.
So they have come up with a compromise, a way to neutralize encryption.
That's the chipper clip.
And that compromise is what the war is about.
By adding chipper clips to telephones, we could have a system that assures communications will be private from everybody except the government.
And that's what rankles Clipper's many critics.
Why, they ask, should people accused of no crime have to give government the keys to their private communication?
Quote, So, again, this mentality that we should use the U.S. security state to spy on our own citizens, to control our own citizens, to criminalize dissent, Did not start in the Trump age, even though it accelerated then.
It was really on steroids in the 1990s, using or exploiting the threat of anti-government extremists.
Right after I first started blogging in 2005, writing about politics, I was a huge critic of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror, especially the assault on civil liberties it engendered.
And at the time, the Bush Attorney General was John Ashcroft.
A vehement supporter of all of these anti-civil liberties measures including the Patriot Act and NSA spying.
And I wrote an article in March of 2006 recollecting that during the Clinton years it was conservatives and the Republican Party that was vehemently against the use of the U.S. security state for these purposes including the very same people who would then join the Bush administration and advocate for those technologies.
This is what I wrote, quote, What conservatives used to say about the limits of the federal government, the dangers of surveillance powers, and investigations into alleged government lawbreaking.
Here's your trip down memory lane when conservatives were against all these things.
And I quoted John Ashcroft, who was a senator from Missouri, Republican senator from Missouri, before being tapped by George Bush to become The Attorney General for the War on Terror.
And this is what John Ashcroft said in the 1990s about the Clinton administration's attempt to exploit Oklahoma City to usher in a domestic security state.
This is what he said, quote, J. Edgar Hoover would have loved this.
The Clinton administration wants government to be able to read internal computer communications, financial transactions, personal email, and proprietary information sent abroad, all in the name of national security.
In a proposal that raises obvious concerns about Americans' privacy, President Clinton wants to give agencies the keys for decoding all exported U.S. software and internet communications.
Not only would Big Brother be looming over the soldiers of international cyber-surfers, he also threatens to render our state-of-the-art computer software engineers obsolete and unemployed.
Granted, the internet could be used to commit crimes and advanced encryption could disguise such activity.
However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps.
Why then should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the web?
The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear.
The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value.
Every medium by which people communicate can be exploited by those with illegal or moral intentions.
Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our email diaries, open our ATM records, or translate our international communications.
And one of the things that happened is, as soon as the Bush administration got elected, the two parties switched sides.
Very few people were consistent.
The Republicans went from decrying those kind of measures to advocating them when they were in control of them.
A lot of Democrats were on board even under George Bush but at least some said, oh, this actually is a violation of civil liberties.
One of the very few people who remained consistent in his defense of civil liberties in the 1990s who refused to say Now that it's the Clinton administration demanding the weaponization of the U.S. security state against domestic dissent,
now that it's a Democratic or a liberal administration targeting right-wing anti-government groups, most Democrats got on board, as they are now, with the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security's attacks on domestic dissent.
And in the 1990s, they were as well.
One of the few people who didn't do that and he was mauled and maligned and basically expelled from left liberal discourse was the kind of left liberal aristocrat, Gore Vidal, who was so many things in the 20th century.
He was born into this upper class political family.
He was a cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy.
He was a stalwart member of the Democratic Party.
He ran for the House in New York and then the Senate in California as a Democrat.
On the left flank of the Democratic Party but still being a Democrat, he also was a literary figure.
He wrote several novels that were among the most celebrated among the 20th century including Meyer Breckenridge and historical novels like one about Aaron Burr and Lincoln and they were turned into Hollywood films.
He was A left liberal cultural icon and political icon as well, always planted on the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
In fact, in the 1960s, in 1968, ABC News, which was losing in the ratings, decided to present a special debate series between William F. Buckley, who was representing American conservatism, And Gore Vidal, who is representing American liberalism.
There's a documentary about these series, but it was right versus left, and Gore Vidal was the left-wing figure.
They were both very erudite, very articulate, and Americans loved this debate.
So let me just show you a little sample to kind of build up Gore Vidal's bona fides as a Democratic Party politician, as a left-liberal ideologue, because in the 1990s, he did something fascinating and important and very principled.
And it's through Gore Vidal's critique of the Clinton administration and the U.S. security state that we can really understand how this war on dissent is 30 years in the making.
So here's a clip, a very common clip, between William Buckley and Gore Vidal.
With the growth of the United States.
Now, if I may say so, Mr.
Smith, it's extremely interesting and extremely To sit by and watch professional critics of the Republican Party burlesque people whom the Republicans themselves tend to like.
You may have forgotten that a few moments ago we were treated to Mr.
Gore Vidal, the playwright, saying that after all, Ronald Reagan was nothing more than a, quote, aging Hollywood juvenile actor.
Now, to begin with, everybody is aging.
Even you are, Bill.
That adjective didn't contribute anything extraordinary to the human understanding.
Then he said Hollywood. One was either acted in Hollywood during the time Mr.
Reagan acted, or one didn't act at all.
Mr. Vidal sends all of his books to Hollywood, many of which are rejected, but some of which are going out.
He called him a juvenile actor.
Which is presumably to be distinguished from an adult actor.
Now, my point is, if you play this sort of a game, you can say, look, I don't think it's right to present Mr.
Gore Vidal as a political commentator of any consequence, since he is nothing more than a literary producer of a perverted Hollywood film.
Just as I think ABC has the authority to invite the author of Myra Breckinridge to comment on Republican politics,
I think that the people of California I have the right, when they speak overwhelmingly, to project somebody into national politics, even if he did commit the sin of having acted in movies that were not written by Mr.
Vidal. How about Mr.
Vidal's answer to that now?
Well, as usual, Mr.
Buckley, with his enormous and thrilling charm, manages to get away from the issue toward the comedy.
He's always to the right, I think, and almost always in the wrong.
And you certainly must, Bill, maintain your reputation as being the Marie Antoinette to the right wing and continually imposing your own rather bloodthirsty neuroses on a political campaign.
All right, so that was the sort of debates they were having.
Oftentimes they were substantive, but very often they were extremely acrimonious.
to his credit. These girls, they came, they shared their opinions, they shared their thoughts.
And it's like Isaac said, I do this for a living. I express my opinion for a living.
I think it was more casual for them. But I appreciate it coming on. I thought it was a good conversation. And it's good to flesh out the topics. I think they represent what everybody thinks about the issues. I think in that way, it was balanced. I represent kind of the opposite view.
Gore Vidal was clearly on the left, but like on the mainstream left, he was working for ABC News, running in the Democratic Party, cousin of Jackie Onassis.
And I'm really not trying to score slam dunks and say, oh, well, I got you in my trap. I'm trying to get people to think about a totally different way of thinking in the sense that you could see so much of the talk is, well, everyone should vote.
And yet, in the 1990s, he decided to become a virulent critic of Of the FBI and the U.S. security state and its war on anti-government dissent.
Everyone has rights. Women have rights.
Everybody has these unexamined assumptions about how the world is and how it should be.
He wrote this Vanity Fair article in 1998 called Shredding the Bill of Rights.
And this was at a time when American liberals were completely on the side of the Clinton administration, running around shrilly Fearful of anti-government extremists and militias.
They had been reading the New York Times and Time Magazine and were petrified and wanted them crushed.
Regardless of whether they committed crimes or not, they just wanted dissent crushed.
And he wrote this extraordinary essay in Vanity Fair.
Almost nobody on the liberal office was saying what he said.
I just want to show you a little bit of it.
It's so relevant for today.
Quote, today in the all-out, never-to-be-one twin wars on drugs and terrorism, two million telephone conversations a year are intercepted by law enforcement officials.
As for that famous, quote, workplace to which so many Americans are assigned by necessity, quote, the daily abuse of civil liberties is a national disgrace, according to the ACLU in the 1996 report.
to his credit. These girls, they came, they shared their opinions, they shared their thoughts.
And it's like Isaac said, I do this for a living. I express my opinion for a living.
I think it was more casual for them. But I appreciate it coming on. I thought it was a good conversation. And it's good to flesh out the topics. I think they represent what everybody thinks about the issues. I think in that way, it was balanced. I represent kind of the opposite view.
And I'm really not trying to score slam dunks and say, oh, well, I got you in my trap. I'm trying to get people to think about a totally different way of thinking in the sense that you could see so much of the talk is, well, everyone should vote.
searches, delays. The state of the art of citizen harassment is still in its infancy.
Nevertheless, new devices, at ever greater expense, are coming onto the market and soon to an airport near you, including the dream machine of every horny schoolboy.
Everyone has rights. Women have rights.
Everybody has these unexamined assumptions about how the world is and how it should be.
The, quote, body search contraband detection system created by American science and engineering can x-ray through clothing to reveal the naked body, which in large imagery can then be cast onto a screen for prurient analysis.
Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City.
Three warning bells from a heartland that most of us are urban dwellers know little or nothing about.
What is the cause of world dwellers' rage?
In 1996, there were 1,471 mergers of American corporations in the interest of consolidation.
to his credit. These girls, they came, they shared their opinions, they shared their thoughts.
And it's like Isaac said, I do this for a living. I express my opinion for a living.
I think it was more casual for them. But I appreciate it coming on. I thought it was a good conversation. And it's good to flesh out the topics. I think they represent what everybody thinks about the issues. I think in that way, it was balanced. I represent kind of the opposite view.
And I'm really not trying to score slam dunks and say, oh, well, I got you in my trap. I'm trying to get people to think about a totally different way of thinking in the sense that you could see so much of the talk is, well, everyone should vote.
Everyone has rights. Women have rights.
The constitutional language used by Lincoln to wage civil war, suspend habeas corpus, shut down newspapers, and free Southern slaves.
Everybody has these unexamined assumptions about how the world is and how it should be.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees, quote, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.
No warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation.
The Fourth Amendment is the people's principles defense against totalitarian government.
It is a defense that is now daily breached.
Both by deed and law.
In James Bovert's 1994 book, Lost Rights, the author has assembled a great deal of material on just what our law enforcers are up to, and then never to be won wars against drugs and terrorism as they do daily battle with the American people in their homes and cars, on buses and planes, indeed wherever they can get at them, by hook or by crook.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Agency, FBI, IRS, etc.
are so many Jacobins at war against the lives, freedoms, and property of our citizens.
The FBI's slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise.
A mildly crazed religious leader called David Koresh had started a commune with several hundred followers, men, women, and children.
Koresh preached world's end.
Variously, ATF and FBI found him an ideal enemy to persecute.
He was accused of numerous unsubstantiated crimes, including this decade's favorite, pedophilia, but was never given the benefit of due process to determine his guilt or innocence.
David Koppel and Paul H. Blackman have now written the best and most detailed account of the American government's current war on its unhappy citizenry in No More Wacos, What's Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It.
They described first the harassment of Koresh and his religious group, the Branch Davidians, minding the Lord's business in their commune.
Second, the demonizing of him in the media.
Third, the February 28, 1993 attack on the commune.
Seventy-six agents stormed the communal buildings that contained 127 men, women, and children, four ATF agents, and six Branch Davidians died.
Koresh had been accused of possessing illegal firearms, even though he had previously invited law enforcement agents into the commune to look at their weapons and their registrations.
to his credit. These girls, they came, they shared their opinions, they shared their thoughts.
And it's like Isaac said, I do this for a living. I express my opinion for a living.
I think it was more casual for them. But I appreciate it coming on. I thought it was a good conversation. And it's good to flesh out the topics. I think they represent what everybody thinks about the issues. I think in that way, it was balanced. I represent kind of the opposite view.
And I'm really not trying to score slam dunks and say, oh, well, I got you in my trap. I'm trying to get people to think about a totally different way of thinking in the sense that you could see so much of the talk is, well, everyone should vote.
He was defending What the government and the media in unison were calling anti-government right-wing extremists, people who had concluded that the federal government was illegitimate and therefore the government decided to wage war on them as a result of that belief.
Everyone has rights. Women have rights.
Everybody has these unexamined assumptions about how the world is and how it should be.
A core attack on everything the United States Constitution is supposed to guarantee One of the people who read the Vanity Fair article was Timothy McVeigh, who had by that point been imprisoned, arrested and imprisoned, and convicted and sentenced to death for his bombing of the Oklahoma City attack.
And he wrote to Gore Vidal and they initiated a correspondence over the next several years.
They never met in person.
They never communicated by telephone.
They only communicated by email.
Or by written letter, rather, but Timothy McVeigh obviously saw in that defense a vindication of his cause, not of his act, but of his cause, and the cause of the people he thought he was representing.
And when Timothy McVeigh was to be sentenced to death, he had five people he could invite to be witnesses, to witness his execution.
One of them was Gore Vidal, though he couldn't make it.
In 2001, before the 9-11 attack, Gore Vidal went back to Vanity Fair to reflect on what he called the meaning of Timothy McVeigh.
There you see Gore Vidal and the meaning of Timothy McVeigh.
And he wrote an essay that is at least as courageous and important as that first one.
I'm just going to share a couple parts with you that are particularly relevant to our situation today.
Quote, Since McVeigh had been revealed as evil itself, no one was interested in why he had done what he had done.
But then why is a question the media are trained to shy away from?
Too dangerous. One might actually learn why something had happened and become thoughtful.
Now the irony of this is that the position of the left had always been, when it comes to things like violent crime, that you don't just denounce criminals, you try and understand the root causes.
And one of the things I did often when reporting on the war on terror was try and explain and document why so many people had decided that they wanted to come to the United States and bring violence to the United States and kill Americans.
Because David Fromm and Neocons and the Bush and Cheney administration created this lie that the reason there was anti-American sentiment is because they hated our freedoms.
And yet when people would be arrested for planting bombs in Times Square or trying to detonate a bomb on a plane and they were asked, why did you do it?
They would say the reason we wanted to bring violence to the United States is because you've been bringing violence to our shores.
You drone and bomb our wedding parties.
You kill our children and our women and our innocent people and you don't care.
And so we know the only way to stop that is by bringing Violence to you.
Now, again, the only point there was to say, you can't just condemn these people.
Understanding why that happens is crucial, and that's what Gore Vidal was saying, to understand where this anti-government rage was coming from, but the media had decided that was off-limits.
You could not talk about the reason for this rage.
He then went on, quote, This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators,
whether in the FBI or the Supreme Court or toiling for big tobacco, are up to.
It is also a sure way of keeping information from the public, the function, alas, of corporate media.
Let's just stop there for a second and take a look at that sentence because I find it really remarkable that this is something that Gore Vidal, who had spent his life in media, Often being celebrated by it and employed by it, had concluded after living through the 1990s,
he said, refusing to ask why and then calling anybody who has a deviant view a conspiracy theory, that is a sure way of keeping information from the public.
And that function, keeping information from the public, is the core function of corporate media.
Someone who had worked inside of it his whole life said the function of these large media corporations is to keep the public ignorant and deceived.
And that, of course, is absolutely true.
He went on in this essay, quote, As for the purposes of state police power, after the bombing, Clinton signed into law orders allowing the police to commit all sorts of crimes against the Constitution in the interest of combating terrorism.
On April 20th, 1986, Hitler's birthday of golden memory, at least for the producers of the producers, President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism Act, quote, for the protection of the people and the state.
The emphasis, of course, is on the second now, on the state.
While a month earlier, the mysterious Louis Free, the FBI director, had informed Congress of his plans for expanded wiretapping by his secret police.
Clinton described his Anti-Terrorism Act in familiar language.
From the USA Today on March 1st, 1993, quote, We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.
A year later, April 19, 1994, on MTV, Clinton said, quote, A lot of people say there's too much personal freedom.
When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
On that plagiant note, he graduated cum laude from the Newt Gingrich Academy.
In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
Details are supplied by HR 97, a camera born of Clinton Reno and the mysterious Mr.
Free. A 2,500-man rapid-deployment strike force would be organized under the Attorney General with dictatorial powers.
The Chief of Police of Windsor, Missouri, Joe Hendricks, spoke out against this super-constitutional police force.
Under this legislation, Hendricks said, quote, an agent of the FBI could walk into my office and commandeer this police department.
If you don't believe that, read the crime bill that Clinton signed into law in 1995.
There is talk of the feds taking over Washington, D.C. Police Department.
To me, this sets a dangerous precedent.
But after a half a century of the Russians are coming, followed by terrorists from proliferating rogue states, as well as the ongoing horrors of drug-related crime, there's little respite for a people so routinely, so fiercely disinformed.
Yet there is a native suspicion that seems to be a part of the individual American psyche.
As demonstrated in polls anyways, according to Scripps' Howard News Service poll, 40% of Americans 40% think it is quite likely that the FBI set the fires at Waco.
Now remember, this was something the media was insisting was not true, that the government was adamant never happened, and yet 40% of Americans believe the FBI set the fires at Waco.
That's the level of distrust.
In the 1990s, the American population harbored for the pronouncements of the American security state and its media.
He goes on, quote, 51% believe federal officials killed Jack Kennedy.
Oh, Oliver, what how that Roth?
80% believe the military is withholding evidence that Iraq used nerve gas or something as deadly in the Gulf.
Unfortunately, the other side of this coin is troubling.
After Oklahoma City, 58% of Americans, according to the LA Times, were willing to surrender some of their liberties to stop terrorism, including, one wonders, the sacred right to be misinformed by government.
Now, when I say that Gore Vidal was mauled for these views, views that had previously under Republican administrations been gospel for the left, opposing the FBI, opposing the CIA, opposing the federal police force intervention in American descent.
This is something that came out of the 60s with COINTELPRO and the Hoover FBI. But because it was now being weaponized against the political enemies of liberals, being used to criminalize anti-government movements that came largely from the right,
Gore Vidal's concerns about the effects of civil liberties had become heretical and heated, and they set about to destroy his reputation, including by trying to claim that he was a defender of Timothy McVeigh, And even using Gore Vidal's homosexuality to homophobically suggest that he had fallen in love with Timothy McVeigh and that was why he was on his side.
Here just as one of countless examples from The Guardian on August 17, 2001, shortly after that second Gore Vidal essay was published in Vanity Fair, quote, Gore Vidal praises Oklahoma City bomber for heroic aims.
The writer applauds the executed killer McVeigh in his revere-like message that, quote, the feds are coming.
The article said, quote, The FBI were out of control.
What McVeigh was saying was, quote, the feds are coming, the feds are coming.
In his strongest identification yet with the man who confessed to blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people in retaliation for the FBI's, quote, slaughter at Waco, Vidal described him as a, quote, Kipling hero with a, quote, overdeveloped sense of justice, who did what he did because he was inflamed by the massacre.
The FBI's subsequent cover-up and the way it had, quote, shredded the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, he was the man who would be king.
Now, obviously, Gore Vidal always maintained that slaughtering innocent people was unjust, but he was offering a nuanced view of the movement out of which Timothy McVeigh came.
Specifically, the conclusions that Gore Vidal thought were valid, that the government had become tyrannical through the FBI and its obsessive repression of domestic dissent, its attempt to criminalize domestic dissent in exactly the way the Constitution prohibited.
Obviously, Timothy McVeigh was one of the most hated people in the 1990s and sort of claimed that Gore Vidal was identifying with him.
And depicting him as a hero was a complete distortion of what he said, but obviously it was designed to ensure that Gore Vidal was permanently expelled from left liberal political and literary and cultural circles, which is exactly what happened.
Gore Vidal spent the rest of his life as kind of a pariah because of this.
Here is the New York Post in 2007 giving voice to what was really the attack on Gore Vidal, that he had fallen in love with Timothy McVeigh, that he was sexually attracted to Timothy McVeigh, and that was why he had decided to We've been over that before with Julian Assange and Daniel Alsberg.
We talked about that in the Russell Brand context.
Even though I wasn't at all suggesting that Russell Brand is guilty or not, we need to wait for that investigation, but it's always the most effective way to destroy somebody's reputation is to introduce a sexual component to it.
So here is what they said, quote, Gore Vidal is up in arms over a new play that imagines him being sexually attracted to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Edmund White's Tara Haught, which recently finished a successful run in Britain, involves the relationship between a thinly veiled Vidal-like writer named James and a McVeigh-like killer, Harrison.
In one sexually charged scene, James comes up to Harrison during a prison visit gushing, quote, if I thought you'd never know, I'd unzip that orange jumpsuit just a bit so I could see your chest and touch it.
The McVeigh character opens his shirt to show off his torso as a gift to the Vidal character.
Vidal, 81, told the London Observer, quote, Edmund White will yet be feeling the wrath of my lawyers.
It's unethical and vicious to make it very clear that this old faggot writer is based on me and that I'm madly in love with Timothy McVeigh, who I never met.
But that is what is done by establishing left-wing circles if you...
Criticize the U.S. security state when the U.S. security state is being weaponized against perceived political enemies.
That's what they did in the 1990s and that's what they do to everybody today who does the same thing.
Bill Clinton never stopped trying to exploit anti-government sentiment as a reason to vest the government with authoritarian power over our domestic politics.
Here's the New York Times in 2010 when President Obama was president.
The headline, recalling the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton sees parallels.
Quote, with the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing approaching, former President Bill Clinton on Thursday drew parallels between the anti-government tone that preceded that devastating attack and the political tumult of today, saying government critics must be mindful that angry words can stir violent actions.
In advance of a symposium on Friday about the attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building and its current relevance, Mr.
Clinton, who was in his first term at the time of the bombing, warned that attempts to incite opposition by demonizing the government can provoke responses beyond what political figures intend.
Quote, When what you say animates people who do things you would never do, Mr.
Clinton said in an interview, saying that Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing and those who assisted him were, quote, profoundly alienated, disconnected people who bought into this militant, anti-government line.
The former president said the potential for stirring a violent response might be even greater now with the reach of the internet and other common ways of communication that did not exist in 1995 when the building was struck.
Quote, because of the internet, there is this vast echo chamber and our advocacy reaches into corners that never would have been possible before.
Said Mr. Clinton, who said political messages are now able to reach those who are both, quote, serious and seriously disturbed.
It's amazing we started the show with Hillary Clinton saying Trump supporters need to be formally deprogrammed because her husband has been at this for decades, saying that if you distrust the U.S. government too much, it likely means that you are dangerous, someone who's going to spawn violence, someone who needs to be watched.
And just to tie this through line that I promised you I would demonstrate between those events of the 1990s and what's happening today, here from the New York Times, January 11, 2022, the Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department, forms a domestic terrorism unit.
The move is in keeping with Attorney General Merrick Garland's vow to combat domestic terrorism as a priority.
The number of FBI investigations of suspects accused of domestic extremism has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.
The head of the Department's National Security Division, Matthew Olson, said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, We're good to go.
Unveiled the national strategy to tackle domestic extremism, which called for preventing recruitment by extremist groups and bolstering information sharing across law enforcement.
The two most dangerous types of domestic extremists, Mr.
Sonborn said, are driven either by racial or ethnic beliefs, oftentimes, quote, advocating for the superiority of the white race, or by anti-government sentiment from members of militia or anarchist groups.
If there is anything embedded in the constitutional framework, it is the right to be anti-government, to be skeptical of government power, to believe the government shouldn't be trusted.
And going back to the Clinton years and now in the Biden years, And every one of these news stories that we do...
Over the past several years that involves the deployment of the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and our domestic politics, the reverence that polls show that Democrats and liberals now have for those security state agencies, the explicit defenses of them by the Democratic Party saying we should be grateful When they try to interfere in our domestic politics because they're just trying to keep us safe, have roots in this movement in the 1990s that only got interrupted by the War on Terror.
It's been decades that the U.S. security state has been turning inward.
And Gordon Vidal is such a perfect example of what happens to you if you don't switch your views based on which party is in power but instead remain steadfastly opposed To the abuses by the U.S. security state.
And that's why I think this history is so important.
I think oftentimes if we just go day-to-day on news stories without taking a step back and putting it into its historical context, it's much more difficult to understand where this came from, what the real forces driving it are.
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