J20 in the Crosshairs… Fascists Get the Green Light to Terrorize and Murder
August 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
For months, the U.S. Department of “Justice” has been demanding information about all visitors to the disruptj20.org website. Disruptj20 organized direct action protests on the day of Trump’s inauguration. They blocked checkpoints onto the Washington Mall, held parades of resistance, festivals, fairs, speak-outs, and concerts. And they staged an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist march that was attacked by hundreds of cops in full riot gear who indiscriminately sprayed pepper spray and used weapons similar to concussion grenades with rubber cluster munitions in them. Over 200 of the protesters are still facing draconian felony charges including conspiracy to riot, destruction of property, and assaulting a police officer. (See background here).
It’s outrageous enough that the Department of IN-Justice is going after the J20 protesters with a vengeance. But now it has come to light that the government is demanding massive and detailed information on visitors to a website used to organize those protests. According to Dreamhost, the site’s web hosting provider, complying with the request from the Justice Department would amount to handing over roughly 1.3 million visitor IP addresses to the government. An attorney for Dreamhost said, “In essence, the Search Warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website.”
Dreamhost had already complied with DOJ subpoena demands for information identifying the registrant of the website, including the registrant’s physical addresses and e-mail addresses. But they refused to turn over information that would identify visitors, saying that “information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment.”
This logic and direction of this massive, ominous fishing expedition is to intimidate, suppress, and collect data to round up people resisting Trump.
Compare that to the fact that the DOJ is NOT going after… THE NETWORKS OF THE MONSTERS WHO MARCHED, TERRORIZED, BRUTALIZED, AND MURDERED HEATHER HEYER IN CHARLOTTESVILLE ARE WIDE OPEN TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO SEE THEM. The point is NOT the government should spy “equally on” the fascists. The point here is that the tools of repression—which should not be used against anyone—are being deployed overwhelmingly against people whose only intent was to protest government policy, while those intent on genocidal race war not only enjoy a totally free hand, but support from the highest office in the land.
While the Department of IN-Justice demands the identities of 1.3 million people who visited a website of resistance to Trump… they can’t see a terrorist white-supremacist conspiracy that is in plain sight. Over and over these Nazis, KKKers, white supremacists, and Alt-Reich fascists openly declare their intention to carry out a genocidal race war. Nobody needs to be spying on people’s web browsing history to see that. Or, to trace the networks behind them. They are deeply embedded in the military. They openly declare they have active duty police in them, in organizations like the “Oath Keepers.”
And it doesn’t take detective skills to trace the forces behind, and at the top of these networks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist, ran Breitbart News, where he openly took credit for creating “the platform for the alt-right.” At the top of the pyramid of all this is the President of the United States. In his repeated declarations defending the Nazis and KKKers who attacked and murdered people in Charlottesville, and his blaming “the violence” on those who stood up to these thugs, Trump is putting the resistance in the crosshairs of the repressive apparatus of the government, and giving a green light to fascist thugs to attack Black people, immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people, Jews, and anyone who values diversity and the humanity of the most vulnerable.
This is the reality we face. This is a regime that must be driven out by mass political action, in the streets, in the millions. Get with RefuseFascism.org today.
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