A BRIEF HISTORY OF RECENT INSTANCES
OF AUTHORITIES JUSTIFYING HARASSMENT
OF PROTESTERS BY CALLING THEM VIOLENT

From the Nation:

To the frustration of high-level officials who were finding their meetings regularly ruined by acts of civil disobedience, the American public largely refused to see the global justice movement as a menace to society. True, the media tried to create hysteria over a few broken windows, but to surprisingly little effect. The question then became, What would it take to cast protesters in the role of the villain? The answer appears to have been a calculated campaign of symbolic warfare: Remove the images of colorful floats and puppets; replace them with images of bombs and hydrochloric acid. And if it has worked--which seems to be the case, considering the public's relative indifference to police destruction of protest art and banners in Philadelphia, or to the extraordinary pre-emptive violence in Miami--it is because on matters of public security, it rarely occurs to most Americans that so many of the officials charged with protecting them could be intentionally, systematically lying.

Click here for the rest.

That's right, lying. It's pretty wild to think that government officials who are charged with protecting the rights of Americans are going out of their way to violate them. But it's true, and it's been going on for the last four or five years.

God, sometimes I feel like American society is just one big metaphor for high school.

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