The following is an adapted version of Jeremy Scahill’s remarks at “The Anti-Inauguration,” an event in Washington, DC, on January 20. You can watch the event in its entirety here.

On the streets of Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day, even before anyone smashed a car or broke a window, we saw a paramilitarized version of law enforcement on the streets. This is something that we’ve all been groomed to accept as the new reality in this country. We saw it in a very vivid, visceral way in Ferguson, when ordinary people, primarily young African Americans and other people of color, went into the streets to protest the killing of yet another black man in this country and then faced down a militarized police force.

This is not just a coincidence of history or some kind of internal escalation on the part of local law-enforcement agencies around the country. There is an actual program through the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security that sells and provides military gear to state, local, and some other federal law enforcement agencies that was used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the military has decided that they don’t need anymore. Because they’re getting upgrades.