Evidence of Fascism

This is a brief excerpt from the upcoming manifesto by John Putignano

1. Fascism isn’t coming to America, it is here now. Take a glimpse at the evidence…
2. After the events of 9/11 American citizens felt defenseless. It successfully instilled emotions of fear, anxiety and anger throughout the country. Only six weeks later congress passed the most offensive attack on our constitution, the Patriot Act.
3. Americans became petrified when faced with an adversary hellbent on destroying us. This was something we weren’t used to, and many believed surrendering liberties to avert subsequent attacks looked like a slight sacrifice. After the war this would be repealed, right? Americans swallowed this bill like a cyanide pill without realizing that there would be no plan to dismantle it. The Patriot Act was the start of our grooming towards fascism.
4. “Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”-Edward Snowden
5. Liberties were suspended and “out of necessity” we are advised that a court must exist outside the bounds of the law, such as Guantánamo Bay. Here our enemies can be tortured to obtain intelligence. These tactics would normally alarm the populous but we were constantly reminded that these “terrorists” aspire to destroy us all. The radicals want us dead so what’s the problem with eliminating due process when dealing with them? Most fascist states begin with this tactic. Before you know it the government is holding people, even citizens, with no terrorist ties.
6. The Patriot Act gave law enforcement the right to conduct search warrants with no notification. These secret warrants have exploded over the years.  From 2001-03 there were 47 of them and in 2013 there were 11,129. The concern is that nearly all of these warrants were used in drug cases that had nothing to do with terrorism. Once the act green lit the focus shifted. The terrorists were just a pretext to justify the suspension of rights and allow further intrusion into our private lives. Where will it end?
7. During the Iraq war America hired members of a mercenary group called Blackwater. These private soldiers made $20,000 a month while the real American soldiers made a fraction of that. Their training facility exists on 7,000 acres of North Carolina land and the mercenary soldiers are well equipped with superior armored vehicles and helicopters. Blackwater hires ex special forces and CIA agents that specialize in sniping, demolitions and intelligence.
8. This is America’s own shadow army. The Armed Forces are bound to carry out the interest of democracy, however Blackwater serves only the interest of profit. They engage in doing America’s dirty work clear of liability and immunity from prosecution, and this is not limited to jobs outside our country. After hurricane Katrina The Department of Homeland Security sent Blackwater to New Orleans. It didn’t take long for reports to come in of guards harassing and even shooting unarmed civilians. This was George Bush’s shadow army, and it was now operating on American soil.
9. Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany, communist East Germany and communist China all have something in common; they spy on their own citizens. Today in America the CIA and NSA are doing just that.
10. Cell phone calls, text messages, private emails, social media and internet usage across America is tracked and recorded in major data farms. This mass surveillance is not limited to terrorists, but to all US citizens. Right now there are remarkably detailed profiles of many if not all citizens. Our private lives have been unlawfully infiltrated under the guise of “catching terrorists”. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin once said the NSA has “scooped up the entire ocean to catch a fish.”
11. “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say”-Edward Snowden
12. Edward Snowden had worked with the CIA and NSA on the mass surveillance program until he converted into a whistleblower. The state has him labeled him as a traitor, but who did he really betray? Did he betray the citizens when he exposed this unconstitutional program conducted by a rogue agency?
13. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents and identified as “suspicious incidents”. We now know the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering intelligence on citizens and organizations who take part in nonviolent activities. Many forms of activism, such as those relating to animal rights, have been now labeled terrorism. The line now blurs, and a terrorist can now be defined as anyone who opposes the agenda of the government.
14. In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches if they tried to use the airlines. Did everyone of the people on this list have ties to terrorists? The list included many ordinary US citizens and even liberal Senator Edward Kennedy. Professor Walter F Murphy of Princeton University was a decorated former marine with no ties to any form of terrorism. On March 1, 2007, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark because he was on the terrorist watch list. Murphy had delivered a lecture at Princeton in September 2006 criticizing George Bush for violating the constitution.
15. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon independent reporters and camera operators from organizations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. There have been cases where reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. CBS and the Associated Press, while covering the war in Iraq, had staff members seized by the US military and brought to violent prisons.
16. Although the news cannot be stopped, it can be controlled indirectly. The White House has relentlessly polluted the news with lies and discredits any station which harbors an opinion differing from that of the president. Eventually the public will no longer be able tell the difference between real and fake news and all but give up on it.
17. America was founded on dissidence yet today dissidence is deemed “unpatriotic” and “treason”. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which allowed the president the authority to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant” and it further gave him the power to define “enemy combatant”. The president can also delegate anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wishes and thus seize Americans accordingly.
18. If the president decides that I fit his definition of enemy combatant I can be locked me up in a military base for months in total isolation while awaiting trial. Since enemy combatant is a status offense, it falls under preventive detention. No threat, plan or evidence is needed to warrant my arrest. I can be arrested because I look like I might be capable of terrorism. Many will find this hard to believe as it reads like a Tom Clancy book however it is true and it does happens. Citizens won’t believe this until there are high profile arrests. By then it will be too late.
19. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. If the president declares that there is a national emergency in Florida he can send North Carolina’s national guard there to enforce a state of emergency, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.
20. “Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”-The New York Times
21. This directly violates the Posse Comitatus Act which restrains the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. Now the president has authority to declare federal martial law. Our country’s founders structured the government to deny this kind of power at the hands of an oppressive executive.
22. Our total shift into fascism will not happen overnight. It will be a gradual and steady process. In time we will grow to accept it as the norm and when the barbed wire is put up, it will be too late.
23. “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,”-James Madison.

-John Putignano, 2017