“Progressive Prosecutors” are Invoking “Terrorism” to Expand State Power and Advance Their Political Ambitions mtracey.substack.com/p/progressive-…
Michigan rushed to enact a "terrorism" law after 9/11, supposedly to protect the state against Al Qaeda. 20 years later, that same law is being used to charge a 15-year-old school shooter who expressed no apparent political motive, under the auspices of "progressive prosecution" 
MI prosecutor Karen McDonald -- who ran in 2020 as a "progressive" reformer -- has given a number of vague justifications for her use of the "terrorism" statute. Ultimately it's a new, precedent-setting exercise of punitive state power in the name of advancing "progressivism"
In 2002, ACLU of MI criticized the new "terrorism" law, saying it would infringe on civil liberties and that there were already plenty of laws on the books to prosecute any "terroristic" crimes. Exactly what they warned about came to fruition 20 years later -- but now, crickets
Here's what the original sponsor of the 2002 "terrorism" law in Michigan told me about its current application in a wildly different context than what was contemplated post 9/11
It's lazy and facile to throw around the term Terrorism any time a crime occurs which you find especially bad. But at least that's just "terrorism" in a colloquial sense. It's something else entirely when you use criminal law to enforce this infinitely elastic notion of Terrorism
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