Dissent = Insanity

Check out Shep Smith's fawning interview with Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Federal government's outsourced Inquisition. Notice that Fox News -- that "conservative" news provider that cheered on DC's aggressive wars and domestic spying in the name of protecting us -- doesn't show Heidi Beirich, not even a file photo, during the interview. Apparently they do not seem to understand Rule 5 for increasing Internet traffic, so readers must settle for this instead.

Here's a partial transcript:

Beirich: The Department of Homeland Security report got savaged, but they were on to something there. We've had several examples of domestic terrorism just in the last few months. We had a crazed cop killer in Pittsburgh who was motivated by racism and anti-government views, who killed three people in his front yard. We had a guy who was actually found with the components of a dirty bomb according to the FBI in January in Bangor, Maine, who had a whole bunch of anti-government beliefs. We've had two assassination plots against the president by some skinheads.

Smith: How are you handling that through your organization? I'm sure you're getting busier.

Beirich: We've been very busy! Our biggest concern right now is we're making sure we're getting the right information into law enforcement's hands so they can deal with these problems, so we're monitoring all these web sites and publications from these folks, all these racists and anti-government types, and when we see something frightening, we're passing it on to law enforcement.

In case you didn't notice, Beirich is telling us that the Department of Homeland Security report alerting Americans to the terror threat posed by activists supporting gun rights, border security, and Ron Paul was correct. And you can't ignore the drumbeat pounding in the idea that anyone who questions the government suffers from irrational hatred of others.

Shep bids adieu to Heidi by wishing the best of luck to her "terrific organization." Fair and balanced.

In a must-read post on Lew Rockwell today, William Norman Grigg discusses how the old Soviet Union also equated dissent with "crazed" behavior:

This was the logic – if that word applies – behind the political use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union: Only someone clinically deranged could hate socialism, and since such people were a danger to themselves and society, they had to be incarcerated in the psiushka (psychiatric gulag) and forcibly cured of their anti-social(ist) tendencies. The heroic former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recounts his own experience in the Soviet psycho-gulag in his memoir, To Build a Castle.

The Soviet use of psychiatry was an outgrowth of the Regime's longstanding policy of pre-emption: Threats to "stability" and "social order" had to be recognized and aborted before they reached maturity.

We haven't reached the point where we must turn in our friends and family to prove our loyalty and rationality. At least, not yet.