{"id":46829,"date":"2019-06-22T11:26:27","date_gmt":"2019-06-22T16:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=46829"},"modified":"2019-06-22T11:26:29","modified_gmt":"2019-06-22T16:26:29","slug":"the-jackboots-are-coming-mass-arrests-power-grabs-and-the-politics-of-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=46829","title":{"rendered":"The Jackboots Are Coming: Mass Arrests, Power Grabs and the Politics of Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Jackboots Are Coming: Mass Arrests, Power Grabs and the Politics of Fear<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNever has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest\u2014forces that look like sheer insanity<\/a>, if judged by the standards of other centuries.\u201d \u2015 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and \u201cwe the people\u201d have none?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome<\/em> that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-loving people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It works the same way every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The government\u2019s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have been convenient ruses used to terrorized the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more things change, the more they stay the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Case in point: on June 17, the same day President Trump announced that the government would be making mass arrests<\/a> in order to round up and forcibly remove millions of illegal immigrants\u2014including families and children\u2014from the country, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in Gamble v. United States<\/em><\/a> that placed the sovereignty (i.e., the supreme power or authority) of federal and state governments over that of the citizenry, specifically as it relates to the government\u2019s ability to disregard the Constitution\u2019s Double Jeopardy Clause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Jackboots Are Coming: Mass Arrests, Power Grabs and the Politics of Fear \u201cNever has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest\u2014forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[379,26116,6420,6192,6300],"class_list":["post-46829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-government","tag-jackboots","tag-john-whitehead","tag-power-grab","tag-the-rutherford-institute"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46830,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46829\/revisions\/46830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}