EXTREME POLITICS

As reported here about Bill White and Pamelyn Ferdin, we’ve seen an increase in government shutting down loud voices publishing useful information that can be employed against people responsible for certain decisions.

This is interesting to us at Extreme Politics because it’s both smart politics and potentially a sign of instability. It’s good politics because power waits for no one; if you do not act against troublemakers, they will get bolder with each generation and soon present a real threat. On the other hand, if your nation has too many people pulling in too many directions, all of those directions will manifest as extreme movements at some point.

Though only a teenager, Sherman Austin was still quite capable of communicating his politically progressive ideas. After all, he was raised in Los Angeles by his mother, Jennifer, to feel free to speak his mind about any issues of the day. In January 2002, about 25 heavily armed FBI agents raided the Austin home, ransacking it while interrogating the terrified teenager for over five hours. The FBI seized the whiz kid’s network of computers in order to take down his rabble-rousing website, accusing him of disseminating bomb-making information.

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Austin was prosecuted under a 1997 law sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein that makes it illegal to distribute information related to explosives with the intent to use that information in a “federal crime of violence.”

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And when he gets out of prison next year, he will be banned from associating with anyone who wants to “change the government in any way.” Sherman Austin was arrested over 18 months ago. Federal officials charged that Austin had illegally distributed information about how to build Molotov cocktails and “Drano bombs” on his web site.

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You might also want to visit Sherman’s Website, Raise the Fist

We’re mostly posting about Sherman Austin to show that indeed, the federal government appears to be applying this dictum uniformly: if you post information about decision-makers, especially in conjunction with exhorts to act and/or information about means to do so, they’re going to come down on you hard, because they don’t want dissidents of any stripe to think the ground is soft enough to plant those seeds.

It will be interesting to watch as government increasingly tries to restrict these types of extremists, since as pluralism increases, so does a tendency toward extremism.