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<\/p>\nby Caitlin Johnstone, Medium.com<\/p>\n
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The first draft of the civil rights-eroding<\/a> USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9\/11 attacks<\/a>. Legislators later admitted<\/a> that they hadn\u2019t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.<\/p>\n This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following<\/a> back in 2008:<\/p>\n \u201cMonths before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995<\/a>. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of \u2018terrorism\u2019 that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode<\/a> \u2018constitutional and statutory due process protections\u2019 and would \u2018authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.\u2019\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Biden\u2019s bill was never put to a vote<\/a>, but after 9\/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.<\/p>\n \u201cCivil libertarians were opposed to it,\u201d Biden said in 2002<\/a> of his bill. \u201cRight after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, \u2018Joe, I\u2019m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n I point this out because it is now more important than ever to be aware that power structures (and their goons like Biden) can and will seize on opportunities to roll out pre-existing authoritarian agendas. We know it happened after 9\/11, and we may be absolutely certain that it is happening now.<\/p>\n [Good thread compiling the many, many authoritarian measures which governments around the world have implemented and are preparing to implement to deal with the virus. https:\/\/t.co\/cZ3KnMzdPp<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n Commentator and satirist CJ Hopkins has a long, long, long, long ongoing thread<\/a> on Twitter right now compiling dozens and dozens of creepy Orwellian steps that have been taken by governments around the world and by Silicon Valley tech giants in response to the virus over the last three weeks. I emphasize how long the thread is because if you think you\u2019ve finished scrolling through it you probably haven\u2019t; make sure you keep clicking \u201cmore replies\u201d until you get to the current entries.<\/p>\n I strongly encourage everyone to scroll through the thread when you get a chance to get a sense of the scale and scope of the drastic measures that are being implemented around the world, and maybe bookmark it and keep checking back now and then for updates. The entire thread is comprised of mainstream media articles with excerpts; some entries are more jarring than others, but taken as a whole it becomes clear that we\u2019re looking at a whole lot of power being handed over to the kinds of institutions which historically don\u2019t do good things when given a lot more power.<\/p>\n And these are just the steps we know about.<\/p>\n To what extent are these drastic, intrusive, authoritarian measures justified? The answer, in my estimation, isn\u2019t clear yet. There are too many unknowns about the virus, too many unknowns about the responses to it, and too many unknowns about exactly what is going on behind the veil of secrecy in opaque government agencies around the world. There\u2019s an argument expert epidemiologists are making<\/a> that there\u2019s no time to get perfectly certain of these things before dealing with a pandemic, that speed is of the essence and hesitating due to fear of maybe getting something wrong can cost millions of lives. Maybe that\u2019s true; I\u2019m not an epidemiologist and I do not know.<\/p>\n What I do know is that enormous changes are happening, and that powerful people are definitely conspiring to advance their own interests as this unfolds. There are many theories about who specifically is conspiring with whom and the specific manner in which they are doing so, and they\u2019re being dismissed by establishment loyalists as \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d as though that in and of itself constitutes some sort of argument. That conspiracies are happening is actually just a fact that is obvious to any adult<\/a> with a mature understanding of the world, and it can be useful to come up with theories about how that might be occurring; calling theories about conspiracies the thing that they are in a disparaging tone does not actually invalidate them.<\/p>\n There are a ton of theories about what\u2019s going on behind the scenes with this pandemic and the policies that are being put in place to respond to it. Some are smart and relatively well-founded, some are stupid and rooted in generalized paranoia or partisan idiocy, many contradict each other, and many could potentially fit together in some way. I personally haven\u2019t seen enough evidence for any one theory to throw my weight behind it, but I am watching carefully, and I am glad that the hive mind is chewing on this riddle.<\/p>\n One thing I will put my weight behind right now is the prediction that those of us who are dedicated to truth are going to have to drastically revise our worldviews in the coming months. There are such large-scale shifts happening in such an unclear information environment that the only thing we should expect is the unexpected; this virus is shaking things up (and being used to shake things up) in ways we don\u2019t really understand yet, and even before the virus the world\u2019s dominant power structures were acting very weird. This means our ideas about what\u2019s going on in the world will likely have to undergo some revising in the relatively near future; the bigger the revelations, the more revision will be necessary.<\/p>\n Right now that\u2019s the primary piece of advice I have to offer: stay skeptical, stay intellectually honest, and keep your perspectives malleable. If we are more interested in the truth than we are in being proven right or in feeling smug, then we are likely on a collision course with future revelations that will change our ideas about how the world is functioning in some pretty significant ways. If this doesn\u2019t sound possible to you, it\u2019s only because you currently lack the humility, intellectual honesty and cognitive flexibility to understand that you may not be seeing the full picture yet.<\/p>\n Things are shifting; all we can do is keep our minds agile enough to shift with them. Prepare to have your worldview obliterated.<\/p>\n Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website<\/a>, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported<\/a>, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook<\/a>, following my antics on Twitter<\/a>, checking out my podcast on either Youtube<\/a>, soundcloud<\/a>, Apple podcasts<\/a> or Spotify<\/a>, following me on Steemit<\/a>, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon<\/a> or Paypal<\/a>, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise<\/a>, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone<\/a> and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers<\/a>. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I\u2019m trying to do with this platform, click here<\/a>. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission<\/a> to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I\u2019ve written) in any way they like free of charge.<\/i><\/p>\n Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Caitlin Johnstone, Medium.com The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9\/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn\u2019t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=714"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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