Managing a Society in Crisis: A History of Militarized Policing in the US and the Suppression of Dissent Across the Political Spectrum
Policymakers were warned in the 1960s that business as usual would ultimately lead to social breakdown. Instead of heeding this warning, they doubled down on authoritarian power.
Recently, I’ve become co-host for a weekly podcast series called The Catalyst with Joe Martino from Collective Evolution, Dr. Madhava Setty, and political consultant and civil rights advocate David Helfrich. On a weekly basis, we’ll be having conversations that seek to restore signal in a noisy media landscape in hopes of restoring clarity and catalyzing transformation.
This past week, we discussed the tragic ICE shooting in Minneapolis and the deeper crisis behind America’s growing unrest. Here’s the 14-min short take:
Regardless of where you stand on the immigration issue, it can’t be understood in isolation. For example, some of the most devastating drug epidemics were supported at the highest levels of the US government, which protected major drug traffickers while profiting from the trade. The ethnic scapegoating of immigrants is an intellectual shortcut, obscuring the fact that decades of US regime-change efforts, covert wars, and economic destabilization abroad helped create the conditions people are now fleeing from.
Yet there’s even a deeper dimension to this conversation beyond immigration. As I discuss in my conversation with Joe, today’s flashpoint events—from ICE protests to the chaos of January 6—are expressions of a deeper institutional crisis brought about because our systems do not represent the voices of the people.
Whether the flashpoint is immigration, elections, or other complex topics, the same pattern repeats: systemic failures create real pain, but the blame is pushed onto groups and the actors on the stage rather than the structures that produced them. Legitimate public anger is redirected into emotionally charged narratives that divide the public and flatten complex realities. Research shows that we vastly overestimate how extreme those with opposing views actually are. Studies also show that people vastly overestimate how immoral the other side is and how willing they are to subvert democracy. A self-fulfilling prophecy then unfolds when our fears about the other side become the justification for our own extreme behavior.
Today’s unrest is a predictable breaking point and a collective awakening.
In this Substack, we examine the long history of US military and intelligence operations to:
deploy violence and weapons of war on American streets
squash dissent and target activist movements across the political spectrum,
and misrepresent threats to make people afraid of each other and easier to manipulate.
Lastly, this piece closes with a call for unity and viewpoint diversity as a stabilizing force in an era where division is increasingly used to justify authoritarian power.
Setting Context: The Government Study That Predicted Civil Unrest in the 60s
In 1968, the US Office of Education partnered with The Stanford Research Institute (which later became SRI International), bringing together accredited scholars to study social problems and analyze where society was headed. This research produced The Changing Images of Man, which looked at how a vast array of societal challenges were playing out over time, and how the future might consequently unfold.
When they mapped out 50 plausible futures, it became immediately clear that few of these scenarios were actually desirable. Every aspect of society would have to transform in order to bring about any desirable future, one that could sustain a complex society over time and support human development and well-being.
Policymakers understood that while the current system appeared normal and successful on the surface, it was generating cascading crises underneath: environmental degradation, consolidation of bureaucratic and corporate power, growing inequality, the reduction of human value to economic output rather than whole human beings with intrinsic value. If business as usual were to continue, authors warned, “social regulation” would increasingly rely on suppressing nonconformity, dissent, and rational public responses to worsening social conditions. This would require what they called “friendly fascism”: a socio-technocratic system that manages unrest through military power, mass policing, and narrative engineering.
In other words, society’s escalating crises were not caused by ignorance or lack of foresight, but by the commitment to business as usual: a rigged system that was always designed to protect the rich and powerful.
Militarized police forces feed a for-profit, mass incarceration system responsible for unspeakable human rights atrocities while doing very little to rehabilitate offenders, reduce crime, or stop the flow of drugs in our cities. Under both Trump’s first term and Biden’s, sexual violence, suicides, deaths, and hunger strikes soared in ICE detention centers. Solitary confinement in ICE detention centers increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration. Now, immigration detention has become a booming business for private prison giants and shadowy security and weapons firms while ICE has doubled in size in one year–rushing new recruits in despite allegations of poor vetting and training.
A private military contractor formerly known as Blackwater—the mercenary firm whose government work was linked to fraud, civilian killings, and reaping hundreds of millions off the Afghan drug trade—has now been contracted to assist ICE in tracking down immigrants in exchange for monetary bounties. This bounty-based approach mirrors a core tactic of the War on Terror, when US forces offered cash rewards for tips that fueled mass detentions in Afghanistan and beyond. This swept up thousands of people who posed no threat and had no ties to terrorism.
The ever-growing expansion of the national security state is a predictable consequence of sustaining an increasingly illegitimate system. As the powerful have exerted more and more control over the population, dissent itself has come to be treated as a national security or terrorist threat.
Mission Creep
Mission creep is the progressive expansion of military-intelligence operations beyond its original mission and scope.
American police and military forces have spent years preparing for military conflict within the US. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act restricting the military’s role in domestic law enforcement and surveillance was already at risk of being violated back in 2008. War-zone weapons and surveillance technology have been hitting American streets for decades. Some of these weapons and technologies were once classified and originally deployed in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Evidence shows that militarized policing does not make communities safer and is linked to greater violence and repression. Multiple studies have found that police departments with access to military equipment kill civilians at higher rates, adopt more aggressive tactics that erode public trust and escalate conflict, and fail to reduce crime or protect officers. In fact, comparative research across 100+ countries shows that police militarization correlates with greater likelihood of state repression.
Militarized forces in the US have been used for routine policing tasks and even calls regarding mental health incidents and suicide attempts. In 2014, the ACLU reported that SWAT teams were overwhelmingly used to violently raid homes of people suspected of committing nonviolent crimes, even small organic farms for code violations and food co-ops suspected of selling unpasteurized milk products.
In 2016, The Boston Globe reported how the Food and Drug Administration, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Social Security Administration all spent millions on firearms, ammunition, and military-style gear. At least 67 civilian federal agencies collectively spent nearly $1.5 billion on weaponry between 2006 and 2014.
In 2025, the Trump administration reviewed plans to create a rapid-response domestic force of hundreds of National Guard troops to be deployable to US cities within an hour to respond to protests or unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Programs like the 1122 program (created in 1994) and 1033 program (created in 1997) normalized militarizing police, allowing the Pentagon to give law enforcement agencies lethal and non-lethal warfare weapons without the approval or even knowledge of elected government officials. Since then, the two programs have funneled at least $8 billion worth of military-grade equipment into US law enforcement, including assault rifles, grenade launchers, bayonets, combat knives, rapid fire weapons, armored vehicles, military tanks, explosives and pyrotechnics, camouflage gear and other “deception equipment.”
In a 2017 sting operation, the General Accountability Office obtained over 100 controlled items from the 1033 program—including night-vision goggles and pipe bomb materials—with a total estimated value of $1.2 million. All it took was the creation of a fake law enforcement agency, website, and shipping address. The GAO’s fraudulent application was processed and approved within a week.
– The Pentagon’s Hand-Me-Downs Helped Militarize Police. Here’s How, Vice News
Non-lethal weapons developed for war have been turned against the domestic population despite their use violating the accepted standards of human rights worldwide. Tear gas, for example, is prohibited in war under the Chemical Weapons Convention, yet routinely deployed by police against protesters and prisoners. They’re often sold to military and law enforcement as more humane options for crowd control, yet it’s well known that these weapons have caused serious injury, long-term health risks, and death in the past.
Sound weapons developed for war have increasingly been used against civilian populations and protestors. These technologies have demonstrated the ability to knock demonstrators off their feet and induce nausea. Acoustic or sonic weapons can vibrate the insides of humans to stun them, nauseate them, or even “liquefy their bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic messes,” according to a Pentagon briefing. These devices can also cause excruciating pain, with some able to heat up skin from a distance and others that can beam sound into the skull of a human.
How Dissent Became Terrorism
We’re told that domestic militarized policing protects the community from terrorism. Yet how much does that mean when the FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. Read more about terrorism plots hatched by the US government, including cases in which alleged terrorists were acting on behalf of the CIA. This process not only pads arrest and prosecution statistics but also helps justify big budgets by misrepresenting the threat of terrorism.
Since 9/11, the term terrorism has expanded to include any activist group across the spectrum not in favor of the political establishment.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, one of the largest mass protest movements in modern U.S. history (roughly 2011–2016), was not only surveilled but aggressively suppressed using counterterrorism tools and violent policing tactics. Protesters were met with mass arrests, baton charges, tear gas, rubber bullets, and militarized crowd-control tactics. As reported by The Guardian and The New York Times, newly released documents revealed that the FBI and DHS coordinated with local police, fusion centers, universities, and major banks to surveil, disrupt, and suppress Occupy—despite repeatedly acknowledging it was a peaceful movement. Occupy was monitored through counterterrorism units and categorized under “domestic terrorism” frameworks.
In 2014, protests in Ferguson, Missouri erupted after Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. Internal documents show that the Missouri National Guard used militarized language, labeling protesters as “enemy forces” and “adversaries,” with even “general protesters” characterized as a hate group.
In 2019, investigative reporting and court records showed that the FBI collaborated with the factory-farming industry to place animal-rights activists under weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) investigative frameworks, exploring criminal charges—including attempted use of a WMD—that could carry life sentences despite the absence of conventional weapons or mass casualties. Similarly, a nonviolent protest against military base expansion in 2023 led the FBI to open a terrorism investigation, while the local sheriff documented the incident as a hate crime.
In 2021, the ACLU warned of the Biden administration’s domestic terrorism strategy. It marked the first time a national counterterrorism framework was formally established to address domestic terrorism. While focused primarily on white-supremacist violence, the ACLU cautioned that the strategy risked entrenching biased law-enforcement practices and expanding surveillance powers that could ultimately be turned against constitutionally protected dissent.
In 2022, the DHS began officially associating terrorism with anti-government or anti-authority sentiment. The DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin explicitly noted that “domestic violent extremists have expressed grievances based on perceptions that the government is overstepping its Constitutional authorities or failing to perform its duties,” effectively associating terrorism with anti-government or anti-authority sentiments.
Around the same time, the DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board linked domestic terrorism to the spread of narratives seen as undermining trust in government and public institutions. Issues to be censored included COVID origins, vaccines, US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of US support to Ukraine. The board itself was short-lived after widespread backlash once people understood that it would put the government in charge of deciding what Americans are allowed to say—undermining free speech, civil liberties, and the open debate a functioning democracy depends on. Yet internal documents show the broader disinformation and extremism-monitoring efforts continued largely unchanged.
The fears of right-wing extremism/terrorism groups have become a central focus, particularly after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
The Oklahoma City bombing was one of the most impactful terrorist attacks on US soil. The attack was carried out by far-right extremists with suspicious ties to the FBI, as evidenced by a sworn declaration from Terry Lynn Nichols, the only surviving convict in the case. Nichols claimed that his co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, revealed he was taking orders from a high-ranking FBI official, raising serious questions about the extent of government involvement in the bombing plot.
We were told to believe that January 6 was a violent insurrection aimed at overthrowing legitimate government and staging a coup. The events of that day continue to receive extensive media coverage, with a group called the Proud Boys held largely responsible for organizing the rebellion. But it was barely reported that the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant. In fact, the FBI had as many as eight informants within the Proud Boys during the Capitol storming.
As the New York Times reported, “despite the vast amount of evidence the government collected in the case — including more than 500,000 encrypted text messages — investigators never found a smoking gun that conclusively showed the Proud Boys plotted to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.” The FBI found “scant evidence“ that there was an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result. In fact, a senior law enforcement official emphasized that the majority of those arrested acted independently, driven more by personal grievances against the political establishment than by any coordinated effort to undermine the electoral process. Our video, How to Transform Media Polarization, One Echo Chamber At A Time, (link starts at 11:45) explores this complex issue in further detail.
When violence erupts, it provides the perfect excuse for public fear, surveillance expansion, and narrative control. Did federal agencies let the chaos unfold that day or use it as a way to justify crackdowns on dissent?
There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe. The vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right.
— Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, Lynching the Deplorables
Human Unity and Viewpoint Diversity: The Only Real Paths to Freedom From the Control Regime
Perhaps a greater threat to society than terrorism itself is the misrepresentation of extremism and terrorism to make people afraid of each other and therefore easier to manipulate.
When Nigeria’s government failed to address the country’s stark inequality, nationwide protests united Nigerians across religious and ethnic lines. During protests, Muslims would pray while Christians formed a protective human chain around them. National Secretary of the Initiative For a Better and Brighter Nigeria observed that “If there is hunger in the land, the hunger that the Christian is feeling is not different from the hunger the Muslim is feeling.”
Who benefits from creating mass fear in the public that turns us against each other? Politicians and government agencies consolidating their power, the national security and surveillance state profitably expanding its reach, and corporate media capitalizing on strong emotions. After all, the fear of Communism benefitted Adolf Hitler, and made people more willing to conform to harsh militant rule and turn a blind eye to genocide.
In a Yes! Magazine piece, sociologist George Lakey highlights how Norway — despite experiencing the same polarization as Germany in the 1920s and ’30s — did not succumb to fascism during the rise of HItler:
The German left was split terribly within itself: Communist vs. Social Democratic. The split was over vision for the new society. One side demanded abolition of capitalism, and the other side proposed partial accommodation. They were unwilling to compromise, and then, when the Social Democrats took power, armed rebellion and bloody repression followed. The result was the Third Reich.
Meanwhile in Norway, the Norwegian Workers’ Party crafted a vision that seemed both radical and reasonable and won majority support for their view despite the dissent of a very small Communist Party. Grassroots movements built a large infrastructure of co-ops that showed their competency and positivity when the government and political conservatives lacked both. Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes.
Norwegians also took a different attitude toward violence. They chose nonviolent direct action campaigns consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and occupations—a far less fearsome picture than Nazi Brown Shirts and street fighting. Norway therefore lacked the dangerous chaos that in Germany led the middle classes to accept the elite’s choice of Hitler to bring “law and order.”
The Norwegian set of strategies—vision, co-ops, outreach, and nonviolent direct action campaigns—is within the American skill set. Polarization is nothing to despair over. It’s just a signal that it’s time for [us] to start organizing.
We don’t all have to agree on the specifics of a clear path forward, but can’t we agree that another way is possible beyond violence on the streets and a society so polarized that we turn on each other? Each of us has the responsibility to work with our fears in the face of complex issues that lack clear answers. Destabilization, chaos, and polarization may provoke deeper questions that could help us turn to one another—across our echo chambers, political differences, and our need to be right. It seems as though any societal shift begins with a consciousness shift in how we think and relate to ourselves, others, and the world.
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