Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald on the Second War on Terror

On Contact with Chris Hedges November 15, 2021

The liberal and Democratic Party elites have seized on the January 6 mob assault on the U.S. Capital as the domestic equivalent of the attacks of 9/11. Joe Biden calls the storming of the Capitol “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Rep. Liz Cheney, a right-wing Republican whose animus towards Donald Trump has seen her join forces with the Democratic Party leadership, said that the forces behind January 6 represent “a threat America has never seen before.”

The enabling resolution that created the Select Committee that is investigating the events of January 6 calls the mob assault as “one of the darkest days of our democracy.” The hyperventilating about the incursion into the capital, often described by its critics as an attempted insurrection and coup, has effectively shut down questions about whether proposed responses for dealing with the January 6 mob incursion into the U.S. Capital.

There is a collective chant by the Democratic Party leadership and many in the media for the censoring and criminalizing of those that embrace the right-wing ideology and its conspiracy theories. The Biden administration is pushing a bill authored by Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the Select Committee on January 6, to open a second war on terror against domestic enemies. The rhetoric, and the rush to push through legislation that will severely circumscribe our ability to dissent, echoes what we heard in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11.

Those, such as Glenn Greenwald, who warn that such overreach is excessive, unconstitutional, and dangerously weakens of our already anemic civil liberties are excoriated as closet sympathizers with the right-wing. Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, who is also an attorney, was one of the first and most important voices to decry the draconian provisions instituted under the Patriot Act and the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11. He sees a similar lack of proportionality or legality in the government actions being carried out after the January incursion with, perhaps, even more dire consequences.

See Who is a Terrorist in Biden’s America? by Whitney Webb