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The post-9/11 war on terror was a disaster for Muslims and immigrant communities in the United States. Patriotic, law-abiding Muslim Americans were treated as foreign enemies and hundreds of immigrants were rounded up, detained, and deported. Americans constitutional rights were trampled while a sprawling system of mass surveillance took shape. Those brave enough to shine a light on its abuses were, at best, spied on and treated as criminals or, at worst, hounded into the poorhouse and even imprisoned and tortured. The only minor saving grace was that, technically, this war was never waged officially within the United States, where it couldve led to even more alarmingly authoritarian outcomes.

That now seems to be changing under the Biden administration, which, ever since last years Capitol riot, has bit by bit ramped up a burgeoning domestic war on terror aimed at criminals and dissidents at home. The latest escalation in this budding campaign cleared the House on Thursday and, horrifyingly, received the wholehearted backing of the congressional left.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 sailed through the House on a strict party-line vote, with not a single Democrat voting against and only one Republican, Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, voting in its favor. Opposition to the bill was presumably considered politically toxic on the Left, as it was sold as a response to the racist mass murder committed in Buffalo last week, which is presumably why every single member of the Squad voted for it.

The legislation takes a tack similar to previous domestic anti-terrorism bills, making incremental additions to the terror-fighting strategy of US security apparatuses. The focus of this strategy now appears to be aimed at ostensibly homegrown extremists. The bill does not opt for the kind of sweeping overhaul we saw after the September 11 attacks.

The bill creates domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Justice Department, and the FBI. These offices are all set to sunset in a decade. The heads of all three agencies must regularly issue a joint report on domestic terrorism threats, incidents, and arrests and prosecutions. The offices will direct their resources toward the threat categories with the highest number of instances. The bill also requires that they review and investigate hate crime charges with an eye on redefining or connecting them to domestic terror incidents.

The most defensible part of the bill is a section authorizing an interagency task force to analyze and combat white-supremacist infiltration of the armed forces and federal law enforcement. The effectiveness of this directive, however, remains to be seen. Although the bills language uses the term combat, it fails to spell out what this means. Its only specific details are in regard to the reports that federal agencies will be required to submit.

If the bill passes, it will represent at least some progress on a very serious and largely unaddressed problem. On the other hand, it also exposes the contradictory nature of progressives, particularly the Squads, position on matters of civil liberties.

Joe Bidens fledgling domestic war on terror has proven a tricky matter for left-wing lawmakers to navigate. The Lefts historical opposition to bigotry of all kinds made it somewhat less fraught for elected progressives to push back against the original war on terror, given its tendency to demonize and target Muslims and immigrants.

But ever since the national security state shifted its public-facing rhetoric around terrorism from Islamic extremists to far-right ones and with progressives now tending to frame issues around the concept of white supremacy more and more the congressional left has become increasingly quiet on the issue. After all, what progressive wants to look like theyre soft on literal Nazis?

But there are good reasons they should push back. For one, the leading progressive concerns about the license granted to the state by the original war on terror remain with this version of the bill. The powers authorized by this legislation can easily be turned on anyone not simply the odious groups that are invoked for the bills passage.

The Biden administrations official domestic counterterrorism strategy explicitly makes no distinction based on political views and name-checks supposed domestic terrorists motivated by a range of ideologies, including animal rights, environmentalism, anarchists, and anti-capitalists. In practice, the FBI has already imprisoned one Florida anarchist over what amounted to a series of public social media posts. Domestic terrorism prosecutions have exploded since 2020, now far outnumbering cases defined as international terrorism, and many of those have been racial justice protesters that the Biden administration has continued to prosecute as terrorists.

Even if, despite all this, one believes that a Democratic administration can be trusted to responsibly pursue a domestic war on terror, we would do well to remember that the United States is a two-party democracy where power regularly changes hands. Are progressives happy to hand ever-growing national security powers to Donald Trump, who mobilized the DHS for a campaign of repression against the George Floyd protests? Would they be comfortable entrusting them with Ron DeSantis, who just passed yet another law attacking protest rights, this time banning pickets outside private homes? Do they trust GOP-appointed federal agencies not to fudge the numbers and steer prosecutions toward threat categories that arent related to the far right?

Beefing up law enforcement and security powers is an understandable response to horrors like Buffalo, but theres not much evidence that the increase of these powers will succeed as measures of prevention as the bills sponsor claims. Attacks like this are happening on a depressingly regular basis even though the United States is already operating the largest, most expensive national security bureaucracy in its history. Such attacks have continued, even in the teeth of the countrys vast surveillance state that effectively sweeps up and stores information about the private activities of most adults. This is the very same surveillance state that has already given the FBI sweeping authority to go after whoever it defines as extremists which it has mostly used to, again, go after racial justice activists. This is largely why only a few years ago, both leftists and liberals rejected the idea of passing a domestic terror statute in the wake of the horrific El Paso shooting.

Given the long record of the FBI and federal agencies like the DHS targeting vulnerable communities, activists, and dissidents more generally and given the Bureaus copious recent use of far-right extremists as informants to target left-leaning protesters does it really make sense to believe theyll use these new authorities as progressives intend? Its a bit of a glaring contradiction that the same bill that treats federal law enforcement as the leading instrument against far-right extremists is also concerned with its infiltration by white supremacists.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022 is not as bad as it could have been. To some extent, its lucky that Bidens domestic war on terror has so far been fairly incremental. But as more tragedies like Buffalo pile up and as politicians continue to do nothing about the availability of guns or the root causes that drive people toward this kind of hatred and violence in the first place pressure will build to ramp things up.

Right now, progressives like those of the Squad may find it politically easier go along with something that, judging by their past public statements and positions, they quietly know is a bad and dangerous idea. But at some point, theyre going to have to take a stand. And if they dont, theyll risk hurting the very communities and political movements theyre fighting for.

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Progressives Need to Resist the Domestic War on Terror - Jacobin magazine

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Natsha Nandabhiwat

rds La rhallsdttir, the head of the list for the Reform Party in Reykjavk, posted on Facebook yesterday that her party will not only ally with her compatriots in the previous majoritythe Social Democrats and the Pirate Partyshe is also inviting the Progressive Party to join this coalition.

Einar orsteinsson, who leads the Progressive Party list for Reykjavk, has called for a party meeting this evening in Reykjavk to discuss the matter.

rds Las announcement drastically reduces the number of options available for a possible majority in the 23-seat Reykjavk City Council. As reported, she had initially said she was open to working with the Independence Party and the Progressives. That meant a coalition on the right and the left were equally possible.

With this announcement, however, a coalition of the Independence Party and the Progressive Party would still need two seats to form a majority. The Peoples Party has only one seat, the Left-Greens, who also have one seat, have said they will refuse to be a part of any majority, and the Socialist Party, while having two seats, are very unlikely to support a coalition led by conservatives.

Nevertheless, Einar has emphasised that the matter needs to be discussed in detail with other members of the party before any decision is taken on formal talks.

This is a demand within the Progressive Party, he told reporters. We just need to assess how we can best achieve our goals over the next four years and how we can make changes in the city.

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From Iceland City Hall 2022: Progressives In Reykjavk To Meet This Evening - Reykjavk Grapevine

Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl will today offer the Massachusetts voters a choice, not an echo.

That is when Diehl, 52, accepts, as expected, the Republican Partys endorsement for governor at its convention in Springfield.

I have bad news for Maura Healey and her fellow progressive liberals pushing for total government control over our lives, Diehl will say in his prepared remarks.

We know what theyre up to and were not going to let it happen. Massachusetts is not some social science experiment. This is our home.

His speech urges the gathering of conservative Republicans to stand up for their beliefs even when they are not in line with what the mainstream media and the establishment are selling.

They call you names and say youre racist. They kick you off social media and they try to cancel you. Its lonely battle. But its worth it.

Progressives fear us, he says, because we have the courage to stand by our convictions and to fight against their great reset of our country.

We are not going to give up and we are not going to give in. Nobody is going to take our state away from us. Not now. Not ever.

He chastises Attorney General Maua Healey for cheering when rioters in the name of George Floyd looted and torched stores and businesses in downtown Boston and trashed police cruisers, sending nine cops to the hospital.

Healey at the time told an audience, Yes, America is burning. But thats how forests grow.

Really?

Healey is of course favored to win the Democratic nomination for governor over challenger state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, a fellow progressive. The Democratic Party convention is in June.

At stake is who will succeed outgoing Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, who is not running for re-election after serving two terms. Baker, considered a RINO, had control of the GOP wrested away from him by conservative Trump supporter Jim Lyons, now the state party chairman. Lyons supported Diehl.

Baker, who was endorsed by the party at three prior conventions, is not attending this convention and has not endorsed a potential successor. When grapes go sour, grapes go sour.

Diehl, who ran against Democrat U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2018, is being opposed by Wrentham GOP businessman Chris Doughty, who is running for office the first time. It is expected that Doughty will run in the September primary if he can gather the necessary 15% of the convention vote.

Either way, Diehl, who was prepared to run against Baker in the GOP primary, announced his candidacy well before Baker chose not to run. And he makes it clear in his speech that he is running against Healeys, not Doughtys, record.

Diehl, as a former state representative from Whitman, touts his work leading the fight against permanent increases in the state gasoline tax by tying it to inflation, blocking the proposed attempt to bring the Olympics to Boston and having the courage to take on Elizabeth Warren in 2018.

In that Senate race, Diehl beat out two Republicans in the primary to win the nomination before losing to Warren.

One of the first things he will do as governor, Diehl says, is rehire all of the state cops and state employees who Baker fired over the vaccine mandate. Next, he will fire the people who fired them.

While Diehl condemns unnamed others (Charlie Baker) who sat on the sidelines in the last presidential election, he adds, We Republicans pitched in to help Donald Trump become president in 2016.

Trump in return has endorsed Diehl.

I was right here, in the arena, fighting with you, for our families and for America, Diehl says.

Well, Im proud to be doing it with you.

Game on.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

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Lucas: Diehl ready to take on progressives amid race for governors office - Boston Herald

CAL THOMAS| Amarillo Globe-News

How are progressives made? By cooking them in a public school six hours a day, five days a week where they are seemingly indoctrinated with an ideology that contradicts the values and beliefs of many of their parents.

It began as a trickle, but now is approaching a flood as activist groups notably LGBTQ organizations have infiltrated public schools and demanded their views on sexuality and gender be taught.

Here are a few of many examples. In Montgomery County, Maryland (where I received a good education without the culture war stuff), Cedar Grove Elementary School posted this message on its PTA Facebook page: [we] will be celebrating love, respect, and tolerance: by use of video with students holding Pride flags while pledging, Love, Respect, Freedom, Tolerance, Equality, and Pride. What happened to pledging to the American flag?

Also in Montgomery County, a once conservative suburb of Washington, D.C., The Washington Times reports a group of parents are waiting for a federal judge to rule on their lawsuit directed at overturning a school district policy that requires teachers to hide how gender-transitioning students identify at school by reverting to birth names and pronouns with unsupportive caregivers.

Erin Lee, the mother of a 12-year-old girl in Fort Collins, Colorado, complained when an after school arts club her daughter attended turned out to be a Genders and Sexualities Alliance Club. Lee said the club taught that heterosexuality and monogamy are not normal. She also claimed students were told not to tell their parents. Lee pulled her daughter out of the middle school and enrolled her in a private Christian school where she says she is doing much better.

Its not just gender and sexuality that is being taught in public schools. A group of Jewish parents has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the teaching of what they claim are anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist materials in Los Angeles public schools. The materials, they say, refer to Israel as a settler state founded on genocide.

In their book Get Out Now: Why You Should Pull Your Child from Public School Before Its Too Late, Mary Rice Hasson and Theresa Farnan detail at great length with hundreds of documenting footnotes the progress activist groups have made in manipulating the minds of young people whose ability to think critically has yet to be even marginally developed.

This one paragraph sums up the challenge: Public education has been incredibly successful in one area churning out youthful progressives growing numbers of men and women in the grips of existential confusion, perpetual victimhood, and political intolerance….The system takes full advantage of their most formative years in early elementary school, and the indoctrination continues through high school. Thanks to Americas public schools, they show up to college already prepped and ready to play on the progressive team.

The authors have an appendix in which they answer most of the questions raised by parents including how to deal with the cost of private education and whether their kids can play sports if they dont attend a public school.

Refusing to protect ones children from this stuff is a form of moral, spiritual and intellectual abuse. As this school year comes to an end, the summer would be a good time for parents of public school children to consider what is truly best for their offspring. They can start by investigating what is taught in their local school and they can finish by getting them out.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas latest book Americas Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers and the Future of the United States (HarperCollins/Zondervan). 2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Thomas: One way in which children become progressives - Amarillo Globe-News

As a progressive activist, I am dismayed at the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, by a landslide in the recent Philippine presidential election. But as a sociologist, I can understand why.

The vote for Duterte and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality.

I am not referring to the malfunction, intended or unintended, of 1,000-plus voting machines. I am not alluding to the massive release of billions of pesos for vote buying that made the 2022 elections one of the dirtiest in recent years. Nor do I have in mind the decade-long online campaign of disinformation that transmogrified the nightmare years of martial law during the senior Marcos's rule into a "golden age."

Undoubtedly, each of these factors played a role in the electoral result. But 31 million plus votes59 percent of the electorateis simply too massive to attribute to them alone.

The truth is the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense. The challenge for progressives is to understand why a runaway majority of the Philippine electorate voted to bring an unrepentant, thieving family back to power after 36 years.

How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?

Illiberalism Is Popular

No matter how slick or sophisticated the internet campaign was, it would have made little impact had there not already been a receptive audience for it.

While the Marcos revisionist message also drew support from among the middle and upper classes, that audience was in absolute numbers largely working class. It was also a largely youth audience, more than half of whom were either small children during the late martial law period or born after the 1986 uprising that ousted Marcosbetter known as the "EDSA Revolution."

That audience had no direct experience of the Marcos years. But what they had a direct experience of was the gap between the extravagant rhetoric of democratic restoration and a just and egalitarian future of the EDSA Uprising and the hard realities of continuing inequality and poverty and frustration of the last 36 years.

That gap can be called the "hypocrisy gap," and it's one that created greater and greater resentment every year the EDSA establishment celebrated the uprising on February 25 or mourned the imposition of martial law on September 21. Seen from this angle, the Marcos vote can be interpreted as being largely a protest vote that first surfaced in a dramatic fashion in the 2016 elections that propelled Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency.

Though probably inchoate and diffuse at the level of conscious motivation, the vote for Duterte and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality in a country where less than 5 percent of the population corners over 50 percent of the wealth. It was a protest against the extreme poverty that engulfs 25 percent of the people and the poverty, broadly defined, that has about 40 percent of them in its clutches.

Against the loss of decent jobs and livelihoods owing to the destruction of our manufacturing sector and our agriculture by the policies imposed on us by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the United States.

Against the despair and cynicism that engulf the youth of the working masses who grow up in a society where they learn that the only way to get a decent job that allows you to get ahead in life is to go abroad.

Against the daily blows to one's dignity inflicted by a rotten public transport system in a country where 95 percent of the population doesn't own a car.

These are the conditions that most working class voters experienced directly, not the horrors of the Marcos period, and their subjective resentment primed them for the seductive appeals of a return to a fictive "Golden Age."

In the presidential elections, the full force of this resentment against the EDSA status quo was directed at Marcos's main opponent, Vice President Leni Robredo. Unfairly, since she is a woman of great personal integrity.

The problem is that in the eyes of the marginalized and the poor that went for Marcos, Robredo was not able to separate her image from its associations with the Liberal Party, the conservative neoliberal Makati Business Club, the family of the assassinated Benigno Aquino, Jr., the double standards on corruption that rendered Benigno Aquino III's "where there is no corruption, there is no poverty" slogan an object of ridicule, andabove all with the devastating failure of the 36 year old EDSA Republic to deliver.

The rhetoric of "good governance" may have resonated with Robredo's middle class and elite base, but for the masa (masses) it smacked of the same old hypocrisy. Good governance or "tapat na papamalakad" sounded in their ears much like the Liberals' painting themselves as the "gente decente" or "decent people" that led to their rout in the 2016 elections and the ascendancy of Rodrigo Duterte.

Moreover, the Marcos base was not a passive, inert mass. Fed with lies by the Marcos troll machinery, a very large number of them eagerly battled on the internet with the Robredo camp, the media, historians, the leftwith all those that dared to question their certainties. They plastered the comment sections of news sites with pro-Marcos propaganda, much of it memes either glorifying Marcos or unfairly satirizing Robredo.

Generational Rebellion

This protest against the EDSA Republic had a generational component.

Now, it is not unusual that a new generation sets itself against that which the old generation holds dear. But it is usually the case that the younger generation rebels in the service of a vision of the future, of a more just order of things.

What was unusual with the millennial and Gen Z generations of the working masses was that they were not inspired by a vision of the future but by a fabricated image of the pastthe persuasiveness of which was enhanced by what sociologists like Nicole Curato have called the "toxic positivity" of Marcos Junior's online persona. He was reconstructed by cybersurgery to come across as a normal, indeed benign, fellow who simply wanted the best for everyone.

From the French Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Chinese Revolution to the global anti-war movement of the 1960's to the First Quarter Storm, it was the left that usually offered the vision that youth latched on to to express their generational rebellion.

Unfortunately, in the case of the Philippines, the left has simply been unable to offer that dream of a future order worth fighting for. Ever since it failed to influence the course of events in 1986 by assuming the role of bystander during the EDSA Uprising, the left has failed to recapture the dynamism that made it so attractive to youth during martial law.

The left's decision to deliberately sideline itself during the EDSA Uprising led to the splintering of the progressive movement in the early 1990s. Moreover, socialism, which had served as the beacon for generations since the late 19th century, was badly tarnished by the collapse of the centralized socialist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe.

But perhaps most damaging was a failure of political imagination. The left failed to offer an attractive alternative to the neoliberal order that reigned from the late 1980s on, with its presence on the national scene being reduced to a voice yapping at the failures and abuses of successive administrations.

This failure of vision was coupled with the incapacity to come up with a discourse that would capture and express people's deepest needs, with its continued reliance on stilted, formulaic phrases from the 1970s that simply came across as noise in the new era. There was also the continuing influence of a "vanguardist" mass organizing strategy that might have been appropriate under a dictatorship but was disconnected from people's desire for genuine participation in a more open democratic system.

The times called for Gramsci, but much of the left here stuck with Lenin.

This vanguardism in mass organizing was coupled, paradoxically, with an electoral strategy that de-emphasized class rhetoric, threw overboard practically all references to socialism, and satisfied itself with being a mini partner in elections with contending factions of the capitalist elite. To be sure, one cannot overemphasize significant state repression exercised against some sectors of the left, but what was decisive was the perception that the left was irrelevant or, worse, a nuisance by large sectors of the population as memories of its heroic role during martial law faded away.

Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and when it came to capturing the generational energy of working class youth in the late EDSA period, that vacuum was filled by the Marcos revisionist myth.

The Coming Instability

This is the history against which the 2016 and 2022 elections unfolded. But the great thing about history is that it is open-ended and to a great extent indeterminate.

As one philosopher observed, women and men make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. The ruling elite may strive for control of where society is headed, but this is often frustrated by the emergence of contradictions that create the space for the subordinate sectors to intervene and influence the direction of history.

The Marcos-Duterte camp is currently gloating behind the faade of calls for "burying the hatchet," and we should expect this froth to overflow in the period leading up to June 30. Beginning that date, when it formally assumes power, reality will catch up with this gang.

The Marcos-Duterte alliance, or what is now the circle of multiple political dynasties around the Marcos-Duterte axis, is a connivance of convenience among powerful families. Like most alliances of this type, which are built purely on the sharing of spoils, it will prove to be very unstable.

One would not be surprised if after a year, the Marcoses and Dutertes will be at each other's throatssomething that might be foreshadowed by Vice President-elect Sara Duterte's being denied the powerful post of chief of the Department of National Defense and given instead the relatively powerless position of Education Secretary.

This inevitable struggle for power will unfold against a backdrop of millions realizing they have not been led to the promised land of milk and honey and the 20 pesos per kilo of rice, disarray in a business sector that still has memories of the crony capitalism of the Marcos Sr. years, and splits in a military that will have to work overtime to contain the instability triggered by the return of a controversial dynasty that the military itselfor a faction of whichcontributed to overthrowing in 1986.

But probably the most important element in this volatile scenario is a large sector, indeed millions, who are determined not to provide the slightest legitimacy to a gang that have cheated and lied and stolen and bribed their way to power.

In voting for Marcos, 31 million people voted for six years of instability. That is unfortunate. But that is also the silver lining in this otherwise bleak scenario. One of the world's most successful organizers of change observed, "There is great disorder under the Heavens but, hey guys, the situation is excellent."

The inevitable crises of the Marcos-Duterte regime offer opportunities to organize for an alternative future, and this time we Filipino progressives better get it right.

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Opinion | Progressives Need to Understand Why the Son of a Hated Dictator Won the Philippine Election - Common Dreams