RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Biden administration has been steadily ratcheting up its abuse of power to attack political enemies and criminalize dissent. The egregious overcharging and heinous treatment of January 6 detainees in the DC gulag is one painful example. But it’s making even more dangerous moves toward creating thought police. And they are bold enough to announce it publicly.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin on Feb. 7, 2022 that outlined their thought crime agenda. It states, “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM).”

“False or misleading narratives” could very well be used to describe the entire programming schedule of CNN and MSNBC. They even have a TLA (three-letter acronym) for the problem, so you know we’re deep into a bad government solution.

The desire to control what people watch, hear, read and eventually think is deeply embedded in the left’s playbook. They have been at this for generations, but recently have succeeded to the point they are comfortable just saying it outright. They have convinced 40 percent of millennials that “hate speech” is not protected by the First Amendment. The trick now is linking speech they want to shut down to terrorism.

They did that very effectively after the January 6, 2021 riot. They took a political protest that spiraled out of control and labeled it an insurrection or a coup. Then they began to spread that beyond the small number who committed any violence to the vastly larger who peacefully protested. Now they are roping in anyone who supported investigating the election results in any way.

Then they added weak charges of seditious conspiracy for some of the rioters. This ignored the fact that their own indictments showed the conspiracy they found was not to overthrow the government or even the election. It was to have a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) across the river from DC in case Antifa attacked or the unlikely event President Trump himself invoked the Insurrection Act and asked for assistance.

The hysterically named Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol is working feverishly to spin all of this into a web. They are unlikely to succeed because all available evidence so far appears to show no actual conspiracy to conduct an attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But the situation has huge usefulness to the Biden administration. It gave them a way to smear large numbers of their political opponents as seditionists, coup plotters, insurrectionists and the big prize, terrorists. That is precisely what they’re aiming at with this new threat document.

“The primary terrorism-related threat to the United States continues to stem from lone offenders or small cells of individuals who are motivated by a range of foreign and/or domestic grievances often cultivated through the consumption of certain online content,” the document states.

They make their goal of speech control perfectly clear by specifying “the consumption of certain online content.” What is stunning is their unashamed belief that policing this falls withing their purview. It seems to call for an agency focused on ensuring that only online content the government feels is legitimate is allowed—a Ministry of Truth, if you will.

The agency gets even more specific: “There is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19. Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021.”

Aha, there it is. Those right-wing extremists are at it again. And pay close attention to the phrasing “inspired violent extremist attacks.” That is a direct path to “incited violent extremist attacks” and to material support for terrorism. That is how they will criminalize speech they dislike.

Currently, this only applies to foreign terror organizations. But at this pace it won’t be long until they extend that to domestic groups.

That fits right in with their earlier National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism from June 2021, which is directed at designating political opponents of the left into that category. They explicitly tie their social engineering agenda to this new threat: “This approach must apply to our efforts to counter domestic terrorism by addressing underlying racism and bigotry.”

Anyone who is not fully on board with the left’s agenda on those topics is part of the problem, and that means you are supporting the domestic terrorists. The Biden administration also foreshadowed the thought policing by announcing they were deputizing the tech tyrants in this noble cause. Jen Psaki admitted from the podium that the administration tells Facebook what posts to censor.

They have now bragged they are using state power paired with private efforts to push a political agenda. This level of coordination calls into question the legality of having the social media sites act to censor things the government cannot. That is forbidden, but it remains now for a case to be made that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest are acting as agents of the government.

The censorship is bad, but this is really social engineering using the threat of a jackboot on your neck or a trip to the gulag as the motivation to comply. That was why they needed the additional terror multiplier.

We must resist and push back the ever-growing abuse of power in this country. If they succeed in criminalizing dissent, the left will have a clear path to the statist paradise they so deeply desire. The next elections must bring people to Washington deeply committed to rooting this out. That can begin with a new Congress writing budget instructions forbidding a single dime be spent on this anti-constitutional garbage.

“A republic, if you can keep it” was Benjamin Franklin’s worry. This is exactly what he meant. Time to do some of that We the People stuff and shut this down.