Glenn Beck - The Overton Window

With this clear and present danger in mind, it is our recommendation that contingency plans be developed (using data from previous exploratory actions [e.g., Ops. REX-84] and in accordance with HSPD-20 / NSPD-51) with the following objectives:

1. Identification

Educate law enforcement and enlist the populace in a program designed to profile, identify, and report individuals and groups engaging in suspect behaviors, protests/advocacy, distribution of inciting literature, and/or evidencing support of issues that are known “red flags”: [1]

– Militant anti-abortion or “pro-life” organizers / “Army of God” / home-schoolers

– Anti-immigration / “border defenders” / NAU alarmists / Minutemen / “Tea Parties”

– Militia organizations / military reenactors / disenfranchised veterans / survivalists

– Earth First / Earth Liberation Front / “green anarchists” / seed-bankers

– Tax resisters / “End the Fed” proponents / IRS/WTO/IMF/ World Bank protesters

– Anti-Semitic rhetoric: Bilderberg Group / CFR / Trilateral Comm. / “New World Order”

– Third-party political campaigns / secessionists / state sovereignty proponents

– Libertarian Party / Constitution Party / “patriot movement” / gun rights activists

– “9/11 Truth” / conspiracy theorists / Holocaust deniers / hate radio/TV/Web/print

– Christian Identity / White Nationalists / American Nazi Party / “free speech” umbrella

2. Classification / isolation / aggressive watchlisting

Classify identified individuals and groups based on updated DHS threat-level criteria. [2]Aggressively deploy surveillance, law enforcement tactics (e.g., “knock-and-talk” “sneak & peek,” checkpoints, exigent search & seizure), and other available preventive and punitive measures / resources (e.g., No-Fly / No-Buy list) as appropriate to scale.

3. Detention / rendition / interrogation / prosecution

The extralegal practice of indefinite preventive detention / enhanced interrogation / rendition of nonmilitary enemy combatants has been normalized in the public perception, at least to a serviceable extent. The precedent has been established and remains supported by a neutral-to-positive portrayal in the mainstream media. However, with U.S. citizens suddenly in the news in the place of al-Qaeda terrorists, some level of psychological resistance must be anticipated and then defused when it arises. It is the opinion of the committee that such a reflexive populist reaction would prove to be a major obstacle to progress. In fact, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event (on the order of a Pearl Harbor / 9/11 attack), there is a potential that the government’s reasonable actions in this critical area may be met with significant public outrage and even active sympathy and misguided support for these treasonous/seditious elements and their hate-based objectives.

“I think I’ve read quite enough.”

Arthur Isaiah Gardner closed his copy of the new client’s binder, placed it carefully on the conference room table, and then slid it a precise few inches forward, to a spot just outside his circle of things that mattered.

Noah had grown up with a healthy dread of this gesture but, in more recent years, he’d come to appreciate its versatility. As an all-purpose expression of deep fatherly disappointment it worked just as well for a prep-school report card as it did for a disastrously leaked presidential briefing document set to splash on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post.

The old man breathed a shallow, weary sigh and stood at his place, looking every bit as elder-statesmanly as he did in the portrait that loomed over the main lobby downstairs. That oil painting was the closest that most of D &M’s four-hundred-odd employees ever got to their company’s patriarch. When he wasn’t traveling he kept to his office, and his office had an elevator all its own.

“Actually, Mr. Gardner, I think the team would be well served by reviewing-”

“Who spoke?”

Noah’s father hardly ever expressed his anger directly anymore. Not like the olden days; his legendary temper had refined with age and in the past ten years it was a rare thing to hear him even raise his voice. The venom was all still there, but it had been distilled and purified to the point that its victims often failed to notice the sting of the lethal injection. “Who spoke?” was uttered with genuine wonder, as though the old man had been addressing a cage full of laboratory rats when suddenly one in the back had raised his little pink paw with a question.

The room fell dead silent.

“I did.” It was an older man at the far side of the long table, positioned in the power seat on the client side. Nice suit and a fresh, careful haircut, a touch of a rosy blush now rising in his cheeks.

“Stand up.”

The man leaned back a bit in his chair, grinned sheepishly, and then let it fade away. He glanced around, seeking moral support from the others in his party, but no one met his eyes.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said feebly.

Arthur Gardner answered only with a slight upward motion of his open hand, reminding the man that he’d been clearly directed to get up onto his feet. A few long seconds crawled by before he complied.

“To put your busy mind at ease,” the old man said, “let me assure you that the trifling problem you brought us today is already put safely to bed. The story in the Post has been spiked, an eager team of computer sleuths is tracking down the source of your leak, and the memorandum itself is now being thoroughly and plausibly denied by its authors and blamed on an overzealous local bureaucracy somewhere in the barren Midwest. Who will be the culprit again, Noah?”

“Illinois National Guard,” Noah said.

“There. Crisis averted. All neatly handled before ten a.m. this morning by my son. Noah is a brilliant boy, if I do say so myself, though I’m sure he would agree that he hasn’t yet inherited his father’s taste for blood. Even so, he’s more than a match for such a minor predicament.”

In the midst of a sip of coffee, Noah raised his cup in mock acknowledgment of the faint praise. From the corner of his eye he saw the standing man over on the client side raise a curt index finger for attention.

“With all due respect, Mr. Gardner, that may very well be, but-”

“Enough!”

With surprising vigor for a man of seventy-four, Arthur Gardner suddenly swept the heavy binder from the table and sent it crashing into the wall. The government man stopped talking, his eyes a little wider, the rest of his face suspended in mid-syllable. Before the released papers finished fluttering to the carpet, a set of interns quietly scurried from the shadows like Wimbledon ball boys to spirit the wreckage away.

“A columnist in the Wall Street Journal once wrote”-Noah’s father straightened his cuffs from the preceding exertion as he spoke-” that I had more money than God. I can’t attest to that. I don’t believe in God, and like a growing number of the world’s other major economies, I no longer believe in the dollar, either. Only two things are sacred to me now. One is my time, and I’ll caution all of you not to waste another second of it. The other is my legacy. It had been my wish today to present you with an opportunity to share in that, but these interruptions are making that nearly impossible. Now, if there are no further objections to deviating from your faxed agenda, I would love to continue.”

No one said a word, and he nodded.

“Very well, then. In my review of that unfortunate document, along with your wider state of affairs, I was reminded of two significant events in my life. The first occurred in early 1989, when a coalition of businessmen came to me with a challenge.