DHS Targets Democrats’ Opponents Instead Of Stopping Terrorists

U.S. security agencies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars investigating, prosecuting, and jailing Americans for praying in public and walking into Congress. That’s a massive amount of energy diverted from true national security threats such as the alleged terrorist who killed 15 people in New Orleans last week and Congress’s wide-open border.

Hostile foreign agents have certainly used that unguarded border to infiltrate the United States, already prompting a separate terrorist attack, in Chicago on Oct. 26. Given the lack of even basic security controls for the last four years, it’s reasonable to expect more terrorist attacks stemming from the open border, even years from now. Not to mention the possibility of embedded cells for hostile foreign governments.

We were told after 9/11 that we needed a new U.S. Department of Homeland Security and myriad other amplifications of the U.S. security state such as the expanded Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to prevent terrorism. It turns out WMDs aren’t the only lie Americans were sold in that era.

Indeed, powerful entities in our own government used terror to achieve their private political ends rather than rightly enact justice against evildoers, making them complicit with the terrorists. How many defense contracts does peace sign? Not as many as war. Dead and terrified Americans are good for the military-industrial complex — and for its new arm, the censorship-industrial complex.

In its four years, the Biden administration turbocharged the censorship edifice Barack Obama set in motion that expanded during Donald Trump’s first term. It turned federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies into dissent police. Their top threat was Democrats’ domestic opponents — independent and Republican voters — not actual terrorists.

The Biden administration has spent $267 million to censor online speech via national security agencies. That only scratches the surface of the security resources diverted since the Obama administration to policing Americans’ views, including numerous instances of constitutionally protected American speech and protest. Those clearly in the latter camp are Americans now in prison for praying near abortion facilities, censored for conveying accurate information about Covid-19, and prosecuted for protesting school closures and mask mandates.

The U.S. Department of Justice has spent an estimated half a billion dollars pursuing American citizens for largely trespassing offenses on public property, while failing to prosecute nationwide firebombings and Main Street destruction by Democrat allies that occurred just months before. Its FBI has prioritized shock-and-awe arrests of trespassing grandmothers over, apparently, checking into the pro-jihadi posts of an Afghanistan veteran living in a heavily Muslim migrant neighborhood.

The Twitter Files showed DHS and the FBI devoted thousands of taxpayer-sponsored staff hours to finding Americans to mute online and demanding big tech companies delete their speech and accounts. They convene “industry meetings” between federal security agencies and big tech monopolies to ensure compliance. A sub-agency of DHS called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, is the hub of global censorship efforts that continue to this day.

The Biden administration and agencies that often act independently of the executive branch and Congress certainly didn’t stop this after Elon Musk bought Twitter. They didn’t have to. The Supreme Court pretended it couldn’t see the administrative state malfeasance it can see in every other case, and members of Congress just about always prioritize padding their re-election funds over upholding their oaths to defend the Constitution.

It’s not like leadership has changed at any of the other big tech companies, either. Mark Zuckerberg might be apologizing to Trump after letting a kitten out of a cat-stuffed bag for Joe Rogan, but he’s not promising he’s killed his company’s censorship algorithms that have been edited by U.S. security agencies.

The FBI and DHS coordinate censorship operations via dozens of ostensibly private organizations funded by tax dollars, the Twitter Files and House investigations revealed. A new report from a House investigation summarizes:

In the name of combatting alleged election ‘misinformation’ and foreign malign influence, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) partnered with Stanford University and ‘disinformation’ pseudo-scientists to create the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which worked to censor Americans’ online speech before and after the 2020 election. The EIP worked directly with social media companies’ content moderation teams, who gave the EIP’s censorship requests priority. The EIP submitted specific censorship recommendations to social media companies to remove or demote thousands of Americans’ online posts, including true information, jokes, and political opinions.

Homeland Security and State heavily fund internet “listening” tools that flag speech for censorship. It’s a mystery why these expensive tech tools didn’t flag the public Facebook posts of the alleged New Orleans terrorist proclaiming fealty to a foreign terrorist organization. Or maybe they did flag him, but Islamists are no longer a priority for federal “security” agencies corrupted by a cultural Marxist ideology that demonizes white people.

Or perhaps federally edited surveillance and censorship algorithms politicize — and therefore falsify — reality along the lines of the ridiculous AI-generated Google Gemini images showing Founding Fathers as Africans and Eskimos. A recently released House AI censorship report notes the Biden administration’s AI regulations may have caused that highly visible reality distortion.

Could those same AI regulations and the leftist ideology distorting Big Tech be affecting surveillance algorithms, not to mention national security professionals? Or, more directly, did these expensive surveillance tools ignore Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s jihadi posts because he’s a brown Muslim? It wouldn’t be a surprise at all, given how woke national security agencies have become.

How effective can a national security apparatus be that goes out of its way to protect illegal border crossers and jihadis in obedience to leftist ideology? And that these algorithms were politicized right out of the gate indicates such tools always will be.

When Donald Trump surprised the world by winning in 2016, Democrats began to see half of their fellow Americans as the enemy. The national security apparatus credentialed this shocking, anti-American narrative. Free-speech law firms and congressional committees have had to sue to obtain public documents that show national security agencies focusing on Democrats’ political opponents instead of true security threats. Despite four-years of valiant citizen efforts to obtain public documents, the investigations have only begun.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Americans were told we needed to sacrifice historic liberties for safety, including the obviously constitutional right to require security agencies to demonstrate probable cause before spying on us. The same government that used 9/11 (and the Cold War) as a pretext for overturning foreigners’ right to self-rule then used Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, and Covid to dramatically expand its power and further limit ours.

Federal agencies have erased American freedoms in the name of “national security” while opening the border to the worst security threat in American history. Now it’s clear Americans have both lost our rights and our security.

The same people, institutions, and ideologies that can neither preserve our right to free speech nor our right to life — non-negotiable duties of a constitutional government — insist doubting their competence is evidence of “domestic extremism.” Anyone who doesn’t doubt their competence at this point must be mentally challenged or bought off.

The proof is easy for anyone to see: national security agencies failing to deter actual terrorists despite owning hundreds of billions of dollars in manpower and equipment and unprecedented “whole-of-society” surveillance powers. Remember: the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.