I have a great affection for Pope Francis, that great postliberal stalwart. I hear the new mass more often than the old. I am not what most people would call a “radical traditionalist,” at least not in the usual sense. Still, as the federal government’s war on people of faith becomes more and more normalized, it is still worth considering where the conflict comes from, and where it is headed. This is unsurprising in an age when a Catholic family man like Mark Houck can and will be arrested at gunpoint by FBI agents on trumped up charges-though Houck, a devoted pro-life activist, has suggested he will press charges for the feds’ blatant abuse. That’s the gist of an internal memo circulated by the FBI Richmond field office last month, leaked by a former agent Wednesday on the website UncoverDC. Or, in the latest development of a now familiar trend, they target Catholics who may have slightly non-modern sensibilities, lumping them in with “racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists”-with whom, we are supposed to believe, they share a number of “policy issues of mutual interest.” These include “abortion rights, immigration, affirmative action, and LGBTQ protections.” Or it spends months and months carefully monitoring unhinged young men online, goading them along the path away from reason, then steps back and stands by while they commit the acts of mass violence that justify the continued expansion of the security state itself. Now, the domestic security apparatus focuses on American parents who don’t want their kids mutilated or sodomized or taught in kindergarten about the irredeemable evil of their skin color-that is, when it’s not keeping a watchful eye on the U.S. (Turncoat commies like Alger Hiss and the dozens of others whose presence Joe McCarthy courageously revealed to the American people 73 years ago this week notwithstanding.) They also had a decent grasp of what they were defending. The expansion of domestic surveillance after 9/11, though aided by more advanced technology, was actually a far less dramatic shift in the state’s relation to the people than that which came at the start of the Cold War.īack before American empire became cringe again-the brief and only partial interlude between Wilsonian democratism and Reaganite neoliberalism-most agents of the state had a pretty good idea who America’s enemies were. As most people will know, the entire American security state rose up virtually overnight in response to that single threat of communism.
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