Federalist Senior Editor Chris Bedford discussed the industrial fear complex on Fox News Thursday, reacting to former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff — who sits on the board of major defense firms and operates a cybersecurity consulting firm — calling for a Jan. 6 capitol riot commission.
Bedford described his experience several years ago listening to Chertoff lecture on a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport scanner technology that targeted the privacy of Americans.
“This is a whole mystery that’s been built,” Bedford said. “When I was just beginning as a young reporter at the end of the Bush administration, I was at a speech at a major conservative think tank, where Michael Chertoff was there. He was talking about a new technology he was unveiling that would allow TSA agents to scan Americans and get their naked image, and put it in front of a TSA agent to see every single aspect of them, and determine if they were an Al-Qaeda agent. Now, at the end of that speech, the entire audience stood up and cheered and applauded.”
Looking at the bigger picture, Bedford said the fear complex runs deep in Washington, D.C., and earns elites more paychecks.
“All that is to say that over the last 20 years this complex has been feeding and feeding and getting bigger and bigger,” said Bedford. “And who’s been standing in the way of it? You have a lot of leaders of the GOP as well as a lot of the leaders of the Democratic Party that are entirely in favor of this. The fear gets them votes. The fear makes people money.”
“It means power here in Washington, D.C. So you look at what’s the difference between January 6 and the riots — the hundreds of riots we saw that actually killed dozens of people across this country — is that January 6 is a useful tool for that fear and that power. So, he’s going to make a lot of money on that,” the senior editor continued.
