YouTube screenshot.

We are living through a moment of profound danger. Operation Metro Surge is barely two months old, and there is still no end in sight. Nowhere is safe. Not schools, daycares, parks, shopping centers, or hospitals.

What was presented as a crackdown on the “worst of the worst” has calcified into something far more perilous: an open-ended campaign of terror and political theater, carried out on the occupied streets of Minneapolis and increasingly across other parts of Minnesota. A permanent state of emergency has settled in. The presence of federal officers, who outnumber local police, is no longer exceptional but routine. Murder and abduction are treated as collateral. Terror itself appears to be the policy, not the byproduct.

Some call it fascism. Others call it something much worse. What matters more than the name is the recognition that this is not unprecedented. The truth is that this isn’t the first time we’ve been here, and perhaps it isn’t the worst time in the history of this land—a fact that offers no comfort to those living through the present nightmare. The present reality is untenable, as it must be, and everyday people are fighting back, as history suggests they always do. That’s why clarity is necessary. The country in which we now live is severely menaced, not by Putin, Xi, or the Ayatollah, but from within. And it has almost always been from........

© CounterPunch