Independent journalism has been under threat in America for decades. While billionaires are buying newspapers and media companies are consolidating their market share, all in broad daylight, the surveillance state in America is doing its own damage to the exchange of free thought.
Our story today concerns the very selective outrage of America’s intelligence community. Under the last several presidential administrations, the National Security Agency actively expanded its reach into our daily lives in fresh and terrifying ways.
Now, it's turning its attention to journalists. And meanwhile, the security apparatus is letting very real and present dangers gather strength right here on American soil. The hypocrisy is deafening.
Is America Becoming a Police state – Or is it Already One?
The first order of business is to look at where America currently sits on the continuum that stretches between “Utopia” and “Aldous Huxley was right.” The answer should scare you.
It’s worth noting that the growing, looming shadow of America’s surveillance apparatus has not been restrained by “partisanship.” On its way out the door, the Obama administration expanded the ability of the NSA – which has been carrying out warrantless and indiscriminate spying on Americans for years – to share its data with a much more substantial portion of the intelligence community.
No matter how this change might fit your preferred narrative – up to and including that it was a preemptive maneuver to prevent Donald Trump from doing even worse damage – the fact remains that it was a definitive step helping turn America into even more of a police state than it already was. All of it being done, of course, in the name of “national security," a phrase rendered almost senseless by its frequent use and disuse among hawkish members of government.
Now, to the latest "project" underway in the name of national security:
As I reported for Occupy.com, the Department of Homeland Security is courting technology companies to help it build a comprehensive and searchable database of American journalists it deems “of interest.” What, precisely, qualifies a journalist as “interesting” according to the DHS isn’t very clearly defined. But the scope of the project is breathtaking.
The DHS wants to monitor 290,000 news sources simultaneously across the globe, spanning print, digital distribution, traditional cable and – you guessed it – social media accounts. Representatives of DHS were quick to suggest such a project would represent “standard” operating procedures. You can believe them if you want to.
In more realistic quarters, this is expected to significantly decrease the number of American journalists applying for visas to travel abroad and report the news. There hasn't been a greater threat to the free global exchange of information in recent memory, and certainly never in America. If you want to know what’s happening on the ground in Aleppo, for example, you turn to independent journalism. But life is about to get a lot harder for independent voices if this project comes to fruition.
How the ‘Incel Rebellion’ Ties In?
This tale of manufactured hysteria and selective outrage arrives in two pieces. Even as the intelligence community begins its final descent into true authoritarianism by clamping down on the free press – and the freedom to peaceably assemble, speak, rally, demonstrate or write about what’s happening within the U.S. – so too is it ignoring manifestly more worrisome types of danger than journalistic “free speech.”
In other words, through its silence, the U.S. intelligence community is effectively encouraging domestic terrorism. You may still say: “This could never happen here.” But you're wrong, because it already is happening.
It's possible that you haven’t yet heard the term “Incel”. But this so-called ideology – and now quintessentially American movement – has become a very real presence in the country. In fact, Incel, which stands for “involuntarily celibate," has been identified as the “sponsor” of the van attack in Toronto that recently took 10 lives.
Men who self-identify as "incels" are people who have concluded that their sexual frustrations and inadequacies – as well as most of the other problems in the world – are fundamentally women’s fault. Similar to followers of the red pill philosophy, "incels" purport that the “current sexual status quo” – presently ruled by women, who are uniformly picky, vicious and manipulative – will soon be overturned by these so-called socially “disadvantaged” men in the form of a domestic “rebellion.” Sometimes it’s even capitalized: Rebellion.
It was difficult to take this movement seriously until they, too, discovered that vans could be rented affordably and plowed into crowds of pedestrians to make a “point.” But here we are. And here is most of the government, along with the corporate-owned media, not talking about it, or if they are, then not in the right way. Because as we all know, White American Terrorism can’t possibly exist.
Wouldn't it be nice to imagine that were the case. Meanwhile, Incel has become something of an establishment across the internet and the dark web. A vast and ever-expanding network is now busy spreading Incel’s message far and wide. By any conventional definition, the group's modus operandi and desired endgame is capital-T Terrorism.
As we’ve come to fear groups like ISIS using modern technologies to “radicalize” disenchanted, lonely, frustrated religious practitioners, so must we also fear Incel’s ability to use those same tools to stir lost young white men to violence.
We’re not saying every “white person problem” is an imagined one. What we're saying is that Incel isn’t talking about any of the real problems. They’re tilting at imaginary windmills and fostering murderous, sociopathic behavior as a result.
And, so far, they’re being roundly ignored by the Trump administration, which would prefer to go after journalists, certain immigrants and members of specific religions, all while maintaining total disinterest in protecting women and other communities that need support right now.
Imagine if we went after home-grown terrorism the same way we go after terrorists from other countries? If you still don’t believe White Privilege is a real thing, it’s time you started paying a bit better attention.
