Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
The neocon faction of the permanent ruling class, which permeates both parties, is eternally dangerous and must be perpetually kept in check, if not purged entirely.
The year was 2006, in the middle of a decade that cemented my hate for the state, probably forever.
The terror induced by government’s War of Terror propaganda was at its apex.
Jingoistic “Freedom Fries” were on offer at various patriotic establishment because “French fries” were faggy and soft.
The neocons had their guy, literally minus a beating heart, Dick Cheney, strategically placed as the real president, playing his moronic nominal boss like a fiddle.
The PATRIOT Act was in full effect and American civil liberties had never been more broken — although they would be in subsequent years.
And one Newt Gingrich, the viscerally repulsive, bloated embodiment of the rot in the overfed GOP establishment, wanted to censor the internet… because ‘Merica.
It went without saying at the time that, if you oppose state control of the web, you support terrorism.
In order to defend America, once must undermine all of the fundamental founding principles that made it great in the first place.
Via Politico (emphasis added):
“Back in 2006, Gingrich argued censoring the Internet would be the right thing to do when it comes to Islamic radicals who use the web to organize jihad against the U.S.
‘We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,’ Mr. Gingrich said during a speech in New Hampshire, according to a story I wrote at the time for The New York Sun. ‘We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.’…
The former House speaker didn’t go into great detail, but suggested that a group of retired judges or other respected individuals should be empowered to shut down websites that foment anti-American violence. He did not explain how the U.S. would take down sites on servers beyond the reach of U.S. law.”
The echoes of the modern day are uncanny; the more things change, the more they stay the same.
2006 was only 18 years ago — recent enough that the goons who stole Americans’ civil rights and wasted trillions of dollars only to funnel them into private contractors’ hands and destabilize the entire Middle East region in the process, the consequences of which are still reverberating to this day, are still lurking out there, eager for an opportunity to take the GOP back over.
Ron Paul, whom I consider a living legend and an American hero on par with the Founding Fathers, was once the mercilessly mocked gadfly archetype the GOP establishment derided with gleeful impunity.
Paul paid the price of ostracization to push the Overton window in the right direction. Trump took his common-sense ideology on foreign policy and made them mainstream.
The warmongers never went away, though. Flush with sponsorship cash, they will fight tooth and nail to drag the party back into the dark ages and more endless foreign wars, forever and ever. They already occupy the White House, all of corporate state media, and still to this day, by and large, the establishment GOP.
War, especially eternal war, is the health of the state.
It is not the health of a free people.
Because this axiomatic truth is now more or less mainstream among the U.S. conservative base, it’s easy to forget how radical totally non-radical common sense was considered to be in then-mainstream politics just a few short years ago, infested as it was and remains by military-industrial complex cash.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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