Who will be the first to tell me I'm indulging in paranoid fantasies? [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

Whenever the authorities want to stage an attack on civil rights, they do it by first demonizing some subgroup and then creating exceptions to the Bill of Rights that at first only apply to the despised target population. Then, having driven their wedge into the crack, they expand the scope of their rights violations over time.

Thus in the 1930’s to 1950’s it was Communists and first the Dies Committee and then the McCarthy HUAC Hearings, and Americans lost the right to belong to certain political groups with proscribed ideologies. (I remember that when I was drafted in 1967 they made me sign a form on which I swore that I was not/had never been a member of a whole list of organizations, of which the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was one).

People got used to having their freedom of speech and assembly shut down, and the populace as a whole went along quietly when the cops & National Guard were mobilized to put down the antiwar demonstrations.

Then in the 70’s and 80’s, the War on Drugs provided the excuse for a whole wave of incursions on our right to be free from unreasonable searches & seizures, and the militarization of the police began.

In the 90’s, preventive detention began (albeit under the guise of “treatment”), with the universally reviled target of sex offenders. Now 20 states and the Federal Government have laws that permit them to civilly commit and detain “sexually violent persons” after they have served their full prison sentences and involuntarily sequester them in locked “treatment facilities” for indeterminate periods (which usually means for life). These “treatment facilities” generally employ a level of security equivalent to that of a medium-security prison. In 2 rulings, the Supreme Court has already given its stamp of approval to these policies as long as they are cloaked with some nominal pretense of treatment.

This preventive detention scheme disguised as a civil commitment procedure is too good to waste. I predict that within 5 or 10 years, preventive detention programs will be expanded to include other demonized groups such as “eco-terrorists” and anyone else who obstructs the interests of the 1% under the pretext that they have “mental abnormalities” that make them incredibly dangerous and require their being placed on ice for life--all for the safety of the community, of course.

Well, you have to know they’re going to find a means to fill those FEMA camps one way or another, and they’ve already test-marketed the commitment approach and established all necessary legal precedent for it with the various Sexually Violent Person acts.