America has been through plenty of dark times in its history, from a Civil War to depressions and two bloody world wars that leveled much of the world. But for most of us alive today, those events all happened before we were born. Aside from the ongoing menace of nuclear annihilation, the biggest threat we’ve faced as a country was 9/11 when the country’s mainland was attacked by al-Qaeda. It led to what we quickly dubbed the War on Terror, an absurd misnomer that had the effect of not only empowering the George W. Bush administration to invade a country that didn’t attack us, but also opened the door to a new era of domestic government police powers with very little oversight.
While the War on Terror may be something of an anachronism today, the bureaucratic relics of that time are still with us — and they have become exactly what we feared it would be: a domestic police force that has led not only to the repression of basic rights and liberties, but also to a creeping authoritarian state.
