This, right here, is what Autocratic neo-Fascism looks like.
A civil rights group has launched a bid to prevent White House lawyers from obtaining private data of possibly thousands of Facebook users via search warrants linked to anti-Trump protests.
The government-issued warrants, initially served to the social media giant in February just after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, pinpoint three specific users whose lawyers say are considered activists critical of the current administration.
One of the users operated a “DisruptJ20” Facebook page for discussion of Inauguration Day protests that was visited by some 6,000 users—whose identities would be available to the government if Facebook abides by the warrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed in a Washington court a motion to quash or narrow the warrants, holds that the demand to obtain the trove of Facebook data is “overbroad” and violates the constitutional amendment that prohibits “exploratory rummaging.”
It occurs to me that we haven’t seen the DOJ issue a warrant for the Discord Chat logs where members of Unite the Right were discussing violently attacking counter-protestors including “jokes” about running them over with vehicles.
In some of the chats, posters shared photographs of themselves mugging with semi-automatic weapons or homemade shields. In others, they discussed the ideal thickness of PVC pipes that could be used for “thumping” counter-protesters and shared GoFundMe links urging like-minded people to fund their road trips to Charlottesville.
Most strikingly, a number of posts joked about plowing cars into crowds of peaceful protesters. James Alex Fields, Jr. allegedly killed one such counter-protester, Virginia native Heather Heyer, and injured at least 19 others when he rammed his Dodge Charger down a crowded street at the height of the rally.
These guys carried out what they were planning, leading to the serious injury of nearly two dozen people and the death of Heather Heyer, yet instead of even seriously looking into that incident —
which they supposedly are, but who knows since
Hate Crime and Terrorism charges are yet to be filed — they want to know the personal information, chat, photos, direct message and credit card information of people who help put together a non-violent protest simply because it was critical of Donald Trump? This is an attempt to intimidate those who would dissent, to stifle their using the voices to speak freely just as we’ve seen Trump attack NFL civil rights protestors by falsely claiming they are “unpatriotic.’
This is some bullshit.