…is another man’s freedom fighter, as the old saw goes.  Regardless of what one thinks of the Oregon situation or Black Lives Matter, throwing around the word “terrorism” all the time is a bad idea because it degrades the meaning of the word.  Indeed, since the term “terrorism” is not used with any consistency, it really should be retired except in the most egregious and narrowly-defined instances.

A recent article from Barry Donegan at Truth in Media accurately says that the so-called “War on Terror” is “tearing America apart,” which was always the point, of course—divide and conquer.  Keep us all labeling each other with pejorative phrases and ideas that really ultimately have no meaning and are really distinctions without differences.  That way, the banks and their debt from thin air can continue to enslave us unabated, which again, is always the point.

From Donegan’s article:

It is also certainly the case that the War on Terror has driven America to a hysterical level of suspicion towards Muslims, and this has created a civil rights crisis. In setting aside the classification “terrorist” as distinct from all other alleged crimes in how the federal government’s due process rights apply, Muslims have been executed without a trial (in the case of then 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki), denied the right to fly without due process, and detained indefinitely without charges.

However, these are good arguments for ending mandatory minimums in the case of the disproportionate numbers of people of color being incarcerated under the War on Drugs, not an argument for applying mandatory minimums to the Hammond family in the interest of fairness. These are also good arguments for repealing the War on Drugs and the War on Terror and their assaults against the human rights traditions of American jurisprudence, not arguments for strengthening and extending these abuses to additional demographic categories to even the score.

The dream of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement was to extend American freedom and opportunity to everyone, not to expand race-based crackdowns to all Americans.

Indeed, it is an entirely reasonable position to support at least the principles, if not necessarily the tactics, of both the Oregon protestors and the Ferguson protestors.  In fact, the principles of both are basically the same—leave us the hell alone and quit trying to make life more difficult for us than it naturally is.  What sentiment could be more unifying-ly American than that?