One way to have the masses accept whatever future you throw at them is to paint one that is twice as bleak as the half-bleak one they're about to get. If I threaten over and over again to murder you, and instead I only break your arm... what a relief! 
As long as AJ and others keep screaming "Martial Law!", and the "jack-booted thugs" never actually show up on the streets... then everyone can relax, right? We can't be under authoritarianism, because it doesn't look like the picture we've been painting in our minds.
It's the same as the Big Brother ploy - keep everyone the lookout for that one big dictator, and as long as those Saddam-sized posters never appear, there must not be any dictator. Instead, it's dictatorship by committee. Much, much better. :?
strange you would post this now. I was just thinking about this the other day. I got to wondering why people don't seem to give a rats ass at the undeniable progression heading us into an orwellian police state. then I started thinking about a lot of the movies I like. They always show the worst case senerio in a futuristic fashion. Some like V for Vendetta attempt to do a good job of showing a progression that the viewer can connect to, but most of the time the image so beyond what see today that I've started to wonder if those movies don't just actually end up making people feel good about where the country is today rather than have them question where we are.
And I'm not sure Alex is doing this on purpose, but the result I agree may be the same. People like Alex may just enable the masses to look at where we are and feel good.
But there is a valid point in warning/depicting where the current progression of events is heading.
