- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
This has been going on for years, starting largely (though hardly entirely) after the Battle of Seattle in '99. Even little stuff gets it -- the World Agricultural Forum was going to be here in St. Louis a few years back (we're the headquarters of Monsanto), and a bunch of anarchist kids were arrested (largely on building code violations) and treated to having the police chief call them terrorists on the evening news using as "evidence" that they were going to make pipe bombs with PVC and nails.
Of course, they'd been rehabbing their house and putting a new roof on the garage, which requires PVC pipe and nails, and they didn't have any, oh, I don't know, explosives or history of violent behavior or plans for criminal activity or anything.
I'm glad you and Jane were there to give some broader exposure to these abuses; they always start with the people they think no one will pay attention to (radical left kids) and start moving it towards the more mainstream as they think they can get away with it. Like canaries in the mines.
