During the last few years of the Obama administration, I started thinking about how frequently we would be told by the government that we were in imminent danger of some attack from whichever bogeymen were popular at the time. More specifically, I was starting to note how these imminent dangers never seemed to actually materialize. I also found it somewhat curious that the media, who would flood us with these warnings (and, of course, with news of expanded government controls for our “protection”), would never follow up on these false alarms or question new warnings no matter how many false alarms the government would manufacture. All of this led to the creation of this website, which was intended to keep track of all of the supposed attacks that never seemed to exist, and the real attacks which the government never saw coming.

Terrorists Trumped

Before I actually got around to creating the website and creating content, though, something weird happened: Donald Trump was elected president, and the imminent dangers seemed to disappear (or, at the very least, imminent terrorist attacks were replaced with more vague, conceptual “attacks” like increased crime from illegal immigration). Being the pessimist (realist?) that I am, I did not find it very surprising that Islamic Terrorism™ had seemingly disappeared overnight, or that the media had absolutely no interest in reporting on this amazing turn of events!

Anyway, we were no longer in imminent danger and this website was dead before it was even created.

Suspicions Confirmed

Obviously, my initial suspicion about the “terror threats” during the Obama and Bush administrations was that they were nothing more than an effort to create justification for increased support for military operations, the militarization of the police, and the continued erosion of individual liberties. If Trump had made terrorism a major part of his platform and if he were at least moderately competent, I would have perhaps been able to give Obama and Bush the benefit of the doubt that, after more than 15 years, Trump had finally managed to wrap up the war on terror.

Trump, though, didn’t seem to really care much about the war on terror, wanted to bring troops home, and was too grossly incompetent to have actually finished what Obama and Bush had started. That is, unless what they had started was, all along, a war against a manufactured threat.

Officially Open For Business

As I write this post, though, over 20,000 troops have been deployed to the war-zone in Washington, DC where they are bravely battling a non-existent threat that has, once again, put us all in imminent danger. Not surprisingly, this deployment has come along with calls for “no fly” lists, limitations on free speech, and all of the other measures that we saw during the Obama and Bush administrations (plus a few new ones like the need for “re-education” of people with the wrong thoughts). Not even trying to hide what is happening, it is being called a “new” War on Terror™.

The silver lining, I guess, is that it is now trivial to come up with content for this website again, so notsoimminent.com is officially open for business.