Maybe not a seismic quake, but some realization of what's going on. Now if they'll look at the COVID conspiracy ....

Stephen Green “Lynching the Deplorables”

Chris Hedges doesn’t have much love for the January 6 protestors, whom he accused of “Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories.” That’s about what you’d expect from a longtime New York Times reporter with a Pulitzer Prize.

This next part you might not expect.

“But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events,” Hedges went on, “a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.”

Indeed. I’ve been saying just that — along with countless other conservatives and libertarians — since long before I launched VodkaPundit more than 20 years ago.

Hedges explained how Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), started by the Clinton Administration to prevent gangsters from ordering murders from their prison cells, were massively expanded under George W. Bush after 9/11. “The solitary confinement like conditions associated with SAMs undermine any meaningful right to a fair trial according to analysis by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights.”

Once an executive power like SAM is established, it will be expanded and abused. Keep that in mind.

Under Joe Biden, SAMs have been used to isolate Jan. 6 defendants and deny them speedy trials, even though, Hedges wrote, “The vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results.”

Hedges spoke with lefty defense attorney Joseph D. McBride, who warned him that “Power is going to change hands.”

McBride explained:

The Democrats are not going to be in power forever. When power changes hands, that precedent is going to travel with it. If somebody else from the other side gets in and starts to target the people who are in power now, their families, their businesses, their lives, their freedom, then it’s over. America goes from being a free democracy to a tribalist partisan state. Maybe there’s not ethnic-cleansing in the streets, but people are cleansing each other from the workplace, from social media, from the banking system and they’re putting people in jail. That’s where we’re headed. I don’t know why people can’t see what’s on the horizon.

Welcome to the party, pal.

It’s nice to see dyed-in-the-wool lefties finally coming around to the authoritarian horrors unleashed by the progressive administrative state. You know, that one that conservatives and libertarians have been warning them about for, oh, the last century or so.

Maybe it isn’t too late.

I looked up Chris Hedges, and Green is correct: the man is not one of us; indeed, he’s a self-described “socialist and libertarian”, and has a 50-year record of left-wing advocacy that AOC could only envy. Are there any leftists in the current generation who still value individual freedom, and harbor a skepticism that the government is our friend, or have those values been eradicated by their modern education? I’m hoping that Green’s optimism bears out.