Will Shonbrun: Nation Responds to Police State

It was no contest. The turn-out for the Orange Menace in DC on Saturday, June 14, for his birthday, and ostensibly for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, was measly, a joke as compared with the estimated five million Anti-King demonstrators who turned out in cities across the U.S. large and small. 

The empty stands behind the tanks at the Washington Mall said it all: We don’t have kings here. The American public has, finally, taken to the streets and made it plain that we aren’t going anywhere. And maybe this is just the beginning.

The unveiling of Trump’s police state began a couple of weeks ago with his ordering of some 2,000 California National Guard troops at an unruly but limited and short-lived protest in Los Angeles, where 121 people were arrested in response to police wearing riot gear, holding shields, wielding batons and shooting rubber bullets, tear gas and flash bang grenades against the protesters. 

The dictate from Trump was calling out the military, posse comitatus style, under an absurdly labeled “form of rebellion” and “insurrection” concocted by White House deputy chief of staff and official ghoul, Stephen Miller. Calling out the 7th Cavalry, so to speak, has been a Trumpian wet dream come true, but it just might turn out to be a bridge too far in establishing the infrastructure of a police state, which can be turned on anyone. In his addled mind, all he needs to do is cite words like “rebellion, insurrection or invasion,” pinned on any public protest, and it will have justified using this so-called “emergency,” providing a massive monopoly of federal forces against American civilians.

Then, in turn, these same government-militarized agents can be turned loose to make arrests without warrants and detain individuals without due process. It is the first step in a declaration of martial law and the beginning of a dictatorship, from which it may prove impossible to retreat.

So, it leaves a burning question – well, maybe only a smoldering one – and that is where do we go from here? We are not at martial law as yet. This could well be only the first stage of a police state infrastructure. It remains to be seen what will happen to the Homeland Security officers who manhandled, pushed to the floor, and handcuffed California Senator Alex Padilla, who had the temerity to try and question Secretary of Homeland Security and botoxed Sturm Und Drang Queen Kristi Noem at a recent press conference in Los Angeles. 

In “The Rule of Idiots,” Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges writes, “In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.” To make his point, Hedges cites the madness of Roman emperor Nero, the grotesque Hitler and his marginal political accomplices; grifters, con artists, and megalomaniacs. 

Hedges closes with the following: “Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires.”

These are hard words to hear and even harder thoughts to entertain. Now that it seems we are beginning to awaken to the reality of the existential crisis Trump has woven, will there be time to undo what he has begun and counter it, utilizing the tools of democracy and a reawakening of a system of justice based on law and the due process thereof. 

It surely seems like we’re running out of time, and that’s a fact, Jack. For future reference: The Chris Hedges Report: Covering US Foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.