Where does the fight for civil liberties and the right to protest stand now in Pittsburgh?
FIRST OF all, there has been a considerable amount of fear-mongering and violence-baiting in much of the media initially, and it’s still going on. The media and authorities lump all of the different protests together and smear them, implying that activists are going to do horrible things and generate immense violence. They’ve generated a significant amount of fear in the population. The authorities are using this situation to justify a series of policies that are potentially extremely repressive. They have put out a call out to police departments in the surrounding area to supply up to 4,000 additional police. This is not simply a local police matter; it’s a national security matter. The Secret Service and other federal governmental agencies are directly involved in coordinating and training the police in all sorts of tactics to deal with this supposedly grave threat that they’ve projected. So there’s potential for significant police violence as has happened in other places against pro
