ROGER KIMBALL: At the Threshold or Turning Point.
The sharp erosions of our freedoms during the COVID-19 pandemic will go down in the history books, or at least in the official manual of totalitarian crowd control.
How easily the entire population was cowed into submission.
People abandoned their businesses, cowered in their homes, wore pointless masks, and pretended to believe that liquor stores were more “essential” venues than houses of worship.
Amazing.
But it’s also important to remember the martyrs to the ideology of the deep state, the people who were chewed up and spit out as the regime went about the business of consolidating its power and its control over the climate of opinion.
An incomplete but representative list includes the following:
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, who was set up and destroyed by the FBI in order to make room for the Russian collusion hoax.
John Eastman, a lawyer for Trump, who, even as I write, is in the process of being smeared and possibly disbarred because he dared to offer the former president legal advice.
Peter Navarro, a former Trump adviser, who, though he lived practically next door to the FBI building in Washington, was apprehended while boarding a plane. The G-Men slapped the 72-year-old man in handcuffs (and leg irons!) and threw him into a cell once occupied, they were careful to tell him, by John Hinckley, the lunatic who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Then there are parents who object to schools’ force-feeding their children with the radical Marxist teachings of critical race theory, not to mention the latest forms of sexual exoticism.
For challenging those orthodoxies, Merrick Garland, attorney general of the United States, instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, after suggestions their protests might be “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
To combat this fantasy crime, Garland called (pdf) for a “partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
It was all-in to crush the upstarts.
Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.