Over the past couple of decades I've often found myself in increasingly frustrating conversations with folks who can't accept the reality that pretty much everyone in the Pig Empire lives in a reactionary police state that, regardless of who happens to be in political power at any given time, is actively working to undermine the rights of its own people; a reality that seemingly escapes folks who aren't extremely media literate or haven't personally tried to exercise those rights in a way that threatens the capitalist order. One of the easier ways to see this picture clearly throughout much of the so-called "West" is to compare the growing authoritarian crackdown on anti-capitalist and pro environment protestors, versus the responses by these same police states to right wing reactionary violence and fascist riots; where we find that violent fascists are typically treated as individuals who've broken misdemeanor laws, but left-leaning protestors exercising their rights in ways that threaten economic interests are painted as organized terrorists and are met with the full spectrum of policing and carceral options. Take for example this Intercept report from Michigan about local Sheriffs in Oakland County and the FBI choosing to classify "Stop Camp Grayling" protestors who briefly disrupted the University of Michigan career fair as a hate crime against law enforcement and open a terrorism investigation.

theintercept.com/2024/09/13/fb…

They Protested a Military Base Expansion. So the FBI Investigated Them as Terrorism Suspects.

"Treating the Stop Camp Grayling protesters as terrorists is the latest episode in a worldwide trend of governments smearing climate and environmental activists as terrorists — an ongoing Green Scare. Misapplication of the terrorism label frequently serves as pretext for invasive surveillance and sustained scrutiny.

The FBI has a long history of fixating on environmental protest movements as terrorism suspects. The focus escalated in the 1990s. Most of the movements are engaged in routine First Amendment-protected activity; a few use minor property damage as a protest tactic.

The FBI maintains federal domestic terrorism categories that include “anti-government violent extremism” and “animal rights/environmental violent extremism.” Under pressure to generate investigations, the FBI has launched probes against environmental groups based on thin evidence of criminal activity — or sometimes no evidence at all."

And what pray tell did the protestors do to result in both a hate crime and a terrorism investigation being opened in their honor by local law enforcement and the FBI? They squirted fake blood out of ketchup bottles on the NSA recruiting table and two Navy personnel and then allowed themselves to be arrested. Why? Mostly because the Stop Camp Grayling group opposes the expansion of the largest National Guard training facility in America, which requires leasing more than 150,000 acres of forest land from Michigan's Department of Natural Resources. In other words, these folks are forest defenders exercising their constitutionally protected rights to oppose environmentally-damaging militarization who engaged in misdemeanor crimes to accomplish that goal; there is no way on this green earth any reasonable person actually believes they're terrorists, or engaged in hate crimes - and that includes both the Oakland Country Sheriffs and the FBI.

As the article goes on to note however, this excessive policing and authoritarian behavior is part of a much larger pattern that has emerged over the past thirty years (predating even the War on Terror) in which American security forces of various types have responded to political pressure and their own inherent antipathy for protestors by declaring organized protestors terrorists and using that designation to unlock increased funding and anti-terrorism laws to suppress, intimidate, and ultimately crush these movements. Furthermore, while it's very tempting to brush this off as pigs being pigs, the simple truth is that the lack of similar responses to organize right wing reactionary violence makes it clear that we're talking about more than just typical police overreaction here; this is foundationally ideological, in much the same way the disproportional response to Black Lives Matter protestors, or Stop Cop City forest defenders in Atlanta is.

So just what the hell is going on here then? I'd say that as climate crisis worsens and it's becoming clear to more and more people that either capitalism goes, or a planet habitable by eight billion people does, the reactionary police states we live in are gearing up to violently repress folks who don't want to die so billionaires can keep extracting profits on a boiling planet, and might be inclined to do something about it; which is why these reprisals focus on folks who oppose fossil fuel capitalism and murderpig violence.

#PoliceState #Fascism #Protest #StopCampGrayling #FBI #Terrorism #Propaganda