You know why Joe Biden was really given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, right?

Sure, the media spun it as a touching parting gift from a departing President to his bro - but the reality is, Biden was instrumental in the very first steps which the US took towards neoliberal authoritarianism, way back before 9/11.

In the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombings, Biden drafted the 1995 Omnibus Counter-terrorism Act, which created the legal framework for terrorism offences. It allowed federal authorities to selectively enforce that framework according to the subjective beliefs of those accused, it provided for the setting up of secret courts, it relaxed the laws governing wire taps, and it authorised detention without trial. He claimed credit six years later when the PATRIOT Act - which he also voted for - was passed, saying during debates that it was “my bill”. In many ways, Biden’s baby the 1995 bill was more crucial than the formalisation and extension of that near-limitless remit and all that flowed from it - mass surveillance, rendition and torture, Guantanamo Bay - in the aftermath of the atrocity at the World Trade Centre. Ironically, the citation for the Presidential Medal of Freedom could not be more apt for Biden’s stalwart advancement of the US military-surveillance state’s interests: “An especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States”.

We flush our democracy down the drain if we allow political narratives to be dominated by the nice old man getting all choked up after being given a medal.