For some it’s a candlelight vigil, for others an attempted insurrection. Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors march down the streets of the nation’s now-militarized capital, chanting “If we don’t get it, burn it down” while harassing diners at restaurants and destroying property, yet the leftist government overlooks their threats.
The breach of the Capitol on January 6, however, by both Antifa agitators and Trump supporters, has become not only a corrupt media fixation — Biden condemned it as “one of the darkest days in our nation’s history” — but also the catalyst for an unconstitutional second impeachment of a former U.S. president. The exaggeration of this event further prompts an inevitable expansion of government powers to spy on average Americans under the guise of targeting them as “domestic terrorists.”
Appalling in America today is that the toleration of political violence strictly depends on the ideology for which one is seeking justice.
Fascistic tech monopolists such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube brazenly monitor and ban conservative voices, suspending accounts permanently, often without warning. This burgeoning alliance between Big Tech and Big Government will only support an increased effort to conduct surveillance on Americans.
But the surveillance of Americans is not only coming from Big Tech. The military now faces scrutiny. The mission to apprehend “the enemy within” from “launching an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy,” whether civilian or service member, began in the first days of Biden’s presidency. “It’s that simple,” the president said in early January about a new nationwide focus to root out “racists and extremists.”
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Consider the arrogance of newly confirmed Defense Secretary Retired General Lloyd Austin’s 60-day, military-wide “stand down” order, announced February 3, 2021. What type of gap in national security is he opening with a military “pause” designed to purge the ranks of “extremism,” pitting soldier against soldier over ideology? Service members swear an oath to the Constitution, not a political party. So, while commanders are forced to “deal with the safety issues” of discrimination and implicit bias, countries such as China, Iran, and Russia could see a rare opportunity to plot attacks against our interests while the military “stands down” to examine its soldiers. In a ludicrous message, the Biden administration declared that the greatest threat to American national security is not an adversary such as China but homegrown “extremism.”
The U.S. intelligence community’s expansion of foreign spying operations to include domestic ones is likely under President Biden. On Friday, February 6, Biden confirmed that former President Trump “should not have classified information in the form of briefings typically given to ex-presidents, citing Trump’s ‘erratic behavior’ and the risk that he might recklessly reveal sensitive information.” If the government will treat a former U.S. president with such disrespect, how will they behave toward Americans who voted for Trump?
To further the excuse to spy on Americans, the current rhetoric coming from the Pentagon and the White House regarding the so-called problem of extremism connects the incident at the Capitol to responses from the CIA to ramp up surveillance of American citizens, just as the agency did during the 1960s “peace movement” and following the 9/11 attacks. Despite a 1974 charter that prohibits the CIA from spying on Americans on American soil, the world’s most secretive agency continues to flout that rule.
Tasked with addressing what Democrats call the lethal threat of extremist groups, Biden’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, along with Defense Secretary Austin, will inevitably take advantage of wide-ranging access to information gathered domestically by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Haines oversees what is perhaps the most extensive domestic intelligence archive ever assembled: the “suspicious activity reporting” (SAR). This program combines the information-collecting efforts of the FBI, DHS, the federal military, and local law enforcement to influence citizens to report any “suspicious activities” of their neighbors.
Sadly, in today’s deeply divided United States, Americans hardly need to be prompted to call a federal hotline to rat on one another. Many are eager, standing with iPhone in hand, ready to capture video of their neighbors acting inappropriately, as was recently the case for country music singer Morgan Wallen.
With reports swirling of briefings given to both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, signs indicate Biden plans to use expanded powers of the intelligence community to monitor U.S. citizens unlawfully, beginning with the military. The New American will closely follow the development of this expansion and illegal overreach of the DNI, the National Security Agency, and the CIA as it relates to surveillance conducted on U.S. citizens on American soil.
To ignore that the country is moving in a totalitarian direction is to allow arrogance mixed with ignorance to become a lethal weapon. We have to defeat these breaches of Fourth Amendment-guaranteed rights. Such truly misguided ideology must be eroded from within, as it seeks to destroy the core of American values that make this country righteous and good.
