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Per the cancer thing, I was in Seattle many years ago having a smoke. I just started reading DU, I was a Libertarian at that time still, a LibertyForum.com addict. A bum (I thought) came up to me on the street and started warning me about specific leftist groups and indidivuals in Seattle, talked about how they were thugs planning overthrow, and how he had "iced" all these leftists, gave me names. He then went on this schizophrenic rant, mostly WWII and holocaust revisionism stuff, talking about how the communists and nazis were the same, etc. etc.
Out of curiosity I looked up the names he said, they had all died of pancreatic cancer. Leftists in the Seattle scene I had never heard of, against I wasn't a Dem at that time. I figured (because of his later mentally ill ranting) that it was just a bum who read about it and was using it to try to look badass, so I ignored it. But a few years later, the scary part was to come with Glenn Beck's show. He started advancing similar ideas as the bum said about how Communists and Nazis were the same (ignoring the communists in camps and the fall of Berlin by the red army), with a focus on George Soros (jewish financier, which Hitler hated) behind the 'nazi movement', etc. etc. It was mirroring the schizophrenic rant. In addition, Beck made regular references to the left as a "cancer", hosting the Cancer Treatment Centers of America on his show and whatnot. It was like a show based off this bum who claimed to be a murderer who used carcinogenic chemicals to kill. It was enough to make me think that bum really knew something.
Again, nobody knows, maybe the bum was twisting talking points he heard somewhere, but I couldn't ignore it - maybe Beck's talking points were derived from his, not the other way around. The question is who was he? The flavor of the rant, holocaust revisionism and the like, was uniquely neo-nazi. And say what you will about the moneyed New York Republican power base, but I don't think they are anti-semites. In fact some of them are Jewish. And technically speaking I was on the right at the time, but I had no idea about any of it. I got the picture of some kind of weird faction operating in shadows.
But that's just one thing from an ocean of things since 9/11. Its appeared like a lord of the files situation with covert forces, and largest picture I see is people operating out of what can only be total, in the dark, batshit confusion. People sending you messages, warnings. not for things you did, but for things they thought you did that were way, way off. Absolutely world of darkness, total lunacy. A world where Alice says "pie" on the phone with regards to what she wants for her b-day, with Bob covertly listening. Charlie is secretly watching them both, he bakes a pie and throws in Debras face, leaking the photos to Bob, who says "Aha I knew Alice was ordering these actions!" Layers upon recursive layers of that kind of shit.
It would be funny if not for the human cost. I remember riding the bus the home one day, seeing this pretty girl on the phone I knew from school. She was weeping and terrified, talking to her father. I picked up some bits: "Now, its Bush they are just messing with us, trying scare us." I knew the play, she was probably doing some feel good hippy activism when Bob got involved (and thus Charlie). Bob had picked up the probable signs of her "terrorist network" (thanks to Charlie) and was actively involved trying to disrupt it. Which is not to say that Bob and Charlie were involved with actual homeland security activities at all, because in a post 9/11 world organized crime quickly learned that the best way to get people to do illegal activities like breaking into people's houses and setting up recording devices was simply to TELL them they were part of black ops to get Al Qaeda, with the evidence convenient dropped in for them to find it. (I remember watching one activist neighbors house. One guy would drop stuff in her outdoor trash can, another guy would come by when she was out, dig through her trash and find it.) But whatever the reason, the end result was this girl weeping and terrified on the bus, unwilling to report the crimes she assumed came from the federal government because her phones had been hacked. Multiply this story times a million and you have the last ten years in America. OR at least that's how it looks to me.
Ultimately though, something this crazy simply cannot last. Something has to give, and lately it seems to have given. Things are moving more now towards trust and cooperation, people are seeing through all the bullshit and noise. I do have faith in this country getting it together and moving forward as a people again.
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