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Between America and You

I write to you in the year of your awakening. This was the year you saw the Attorney General of the United States of America, Merrick Garland, label parents domestic terrorists. Garland turned the lethal and intrusive powers of the nation’s law enforcement and counterterrorism apparatus against parents whose only crime was not consenting to their children’s indoctrination into ideologies that are the antithesis of the traditional American way of life. 

I write because you know that an unarmed veteran, Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by a rogue politically motivated Capitol Police officer who will never face justice. I write because there are political prisoners being held in pretrial solitary confinement in our nation’s capital for non-violent misdemeanors. I write because your elected officials in Washington, D.C. have determined you are the greatest enemy America faces, and you must be silenced and diminished in society. 

And you know now, if you did not know before, that the federal security services of our country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your life. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding . . . Protest too loudly against the woke ideology and your life can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to take away your medical freedom and you can be labeled an extremist. Turn against the mandates of tyrants and you will be banned from employment, healthcare and education. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions, paid appearances on mainstream cable news programs, and seats on the boards of pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors. 

Destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include cancelling, watchlisting, masking, beatings, humiliation, and murder. All of this is common to working-class America. All of this is over a decade old for the “bitter clingers” of flyover America. No one is held responsible.

You may recognize the above paragraphs. They are a modern-day riff on a passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 book, Between the World and Me. According to Coates, his book was conceived as a letter to his teenage son to express his profound anger at a nation which he believes refuses to prosecute police and government officials for violating the rights of young black men.

How ironic that after only seven years, it now captures the current vitriol of our culture war and the corporate-government tyranny of 2021. Evidently, the tables have turned since the publication of Coates’ seminal work—which undoubtedly was the planned transformation that our 44th president so clearly promised.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

The situation traditional America faces is no secret. The persecution of dissent, religious beliefs, and traditional values is now in the open for all to see. The magnitude of the change in American culture is shocking—not from a sense of surprise as much as from the rapidity and deliberateness of it. We are overwhelmed by the radical changes in our present society. Many are having difficulty processing the totality of it.

When Coates wrote his “letter” to his son, the mainstream media was full of stories of how black parents had to warn their black sons about unwarranted harassment and arrest by law enforcement, even though they were engaging in normal legitimate activity. 

Now it is time for traditional Americans to have that same conversation with each other. In present-day America, the federal government has decided that working-class Americans are a danger to the security of the United States. 

When the U.S. government decides you are a threat, they can bring frightening powers against you in order to “disrupt” what they view as your threatening activity. The tactics they employ are designed to circumvent your due process rights while simultaneously intimidating, coercing, and, in some cases, purposely ruining your life—a method colloquially described as “process as punishment.”

How can traditional Americans avoid this kind of persecution? Start by understanding how organizations like the FBI work. If you haven’t paid attention to past cases like the fake Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot, or read Trevor Aaronson’s book The Terror Factory, then you should start there. It is important to understand that, regardless of how you may have viewed federal law enforcement before 2020, you should now be wary of it because you are the target of this country’s massive and deadly counterterrorism machine.

Indicators and Algorithms 

In most cases, when the FBI or other law enforcement organizations are interested in you, they use informants to get close in order to report on your activities. The FBI doesn’t need probable cause or a defined reason to employ informants against you. In other words, you don’t need to be engaged in, or even appear to be engaged, in illegal activity. When they use informants, they may introduce an experienced professional into your inner circle, or they can approach a friend, co-worker, or even a family member and coerce them or offer them substantial sums of cash to report on your activities.

Informants don’t just report on your actual activities. As occurred in the fake Whitmer kidnapping plot, informants can lie in their official reports or create crimes in your presence, implicating you in something you never intended to participate in. Informants get paid by giving their law enforcement handlers the information they want to hear to bolster their cases. These  government agents get promoted by making arrests and bringing cases to trial—the more flamboyant and colorful the case, the better the headlines and promotions. The system is built to incentivize lying, fabricating evidence, and convicting innocent people. 

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security use a sort of checklist to build their cases with informants. This checklist is commonly referred to as Indicators of Mobilization to Violence, or IMV. The IMV is composed of a list of both common and less-common human activities. They range from attending church, going camping, owning firearms, to traveling abroad, having relatives associated with “extremist” activity, or writing political manifestos, á la the Unabomber. 

The IMV checklist produces a score which is used to determine the danger posed by the subject under investigation. The problem with the IMV is it mostly contains common and constitutionally protected activities, including work-related duties and recreational hobbies. The IMV score can be manipulated to create a justification for extremely intrusive and potentially life-ruining actions by the FBI. Actions which include physical and technical surveillance, official visits to neighbors, employers, or your children’s school teachers, as well as the use of informants to attempt to steer you into a prosecutable crime or IMV-flagged activity. It can result in a person being watchlisted and even placed on a no-fly list. 

Consider this: a conservative citizen, combat veteran, who owns a firearm, attends church, goes camping, hunts, and posts funny memes on social media that may make fun of government officials checks the same blocks on the IMV as an Islamic extremist who attended a terrorist training camp, fought with an Islamic insurgent group in Syria, regularly attends an extremist mosque and posts jihadi suicide-bomber videos on Telegram.

See Something—Say Something

 Now that the upset parents of school children and vaccine-hesitant minorities are being targeted by the FBI as domestic terrorists, it is worth taking some time to learn about this emerging threat to your liberty. For years, Americans wrongly assumed that the word “terrorist” referred to Al Qaeda or crazy white-robed fringe weirdos. Those days are over. The Patriot Act, the surveillance state, and the weaponized agencies of federal law enforcement and justice are now focused squarely on traditional Americans. 

To protect yourself, your family, and your community, it is critical to organize and build support networks. Keep your activities political and focus on fixing what’s broken. No matter how frustrated you get, do not talk trash or violence—the walls have ears. Most importantly, do not participate in or support the FBI’s so-called “counterterrorism” actions against your fellow citizens. If you see something, or hear something about government agents stalking a fellow citizen, speak up to those concerned. You have rights only as long as you are willing to stand for them. You can survive this only as long as you are not isolated. The moment you become obedient, alone, and quiet is the moment you stop being a free American.

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About Max Morton

Max Morton is a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, former CIA paramilitary operations officer, and a veteran of multiple armed conflicts, revolutions, and contingency operations.

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