1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

> the Central Overlords and Spy Partners...

Behold the new Authoritarian system,
and its plans for you and freedom...


Police To Target Americans For Their Ideological Beliefs And Behaviors

https://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2021/07/police-to-target-americans-for-their.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/15/fact-sheet-national-strategy-for-countering-domestic-terrorism/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-trumps-fourth-secretary-of-homeland-security-just-resigned
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trumps-homeland-security-chief-resigns-earlier-than-planned-chad-wolf-donald-trump-joe-biden-threat-extremists-b1785758.html
https://extremism.gwu.edu/countering-domestic-terrorism-conversation-john-cohen-dhs-ct-coordinator
https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/counterterrorism/domestic-terror-landscape-is-a-much-more-individualized-threat-says-dhs-ct-coordinator/
https://www.axios.com/hong-kong-pro-democracy-editor-arrested-collusion-b9a6305d-357a-4970-b518-c71f776c9541.html
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3128836/hong-kong-protests-more-10200-arrested-connection-unrest
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/29/adviser-to-pentagon-counter-extremism-group-warns-of-protected-speech-crackdown/
https://apnews.com/press-release/pr-globenewswire/85eba3a5e241de231c59fb99cd3615ec
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/06/15/background-press-call-by-senior-administration-officials-on-the-national-strategy-for-countering-domestic-terrorism/



Much has been written about President Joe Biden’s new Domestic Terror
law, but nothing I have seen until now shows just how horrifying it
is.

To say that the White House uses the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) like political puppets to push their own agenda would be an
understatement. The New Yorker chronicled four DHS secretaries who
were forced to resign by October 2019, and a fifth who resigned this
January.

So when I heard about DHS counterterrorism chief John Cohen having a
hard time containing his enthusiasm over Biden’s new domestic
terrorism law in a GW Program on Extremism webinar I knew it couldn’t
be good.

Ricardo Vazquez Garcia, from Homeland Security Today describes what happened.

Garcia does a great job of framing the Feds justification for creating
a new War On Terror by targeting American citizens.

    “A lot of progress was made by the U.S. government in dealing with
the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations and in particular
dealing with the way those organizations operated, the way they
recruited individuals, the way they communicated, the way they
developed plans, the way they saw to introduce operatives into the
domestic environment, the way they sought to recruit people here
domestically,” Cohen said. “I think it is safe to say that the U.S.
created quite a robust counterterrorism capability. The challenge is
the threat we face today is significantly different than the one we
faced after Sept. 11,” DHS counterterrorism chief John Cohen said.

As America closes in on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, the Feds want
the public to believe that unknown terrorist organizations are
recruiting your neighbor[s] to become a domestic extremist. But it is
not just any neighbor, this time it is far-right “extremists” or White
supremacists and Trump supporters who they want to recruit.

For years DHS officials have warned Americans of the dangers that lurk
just outside their front doors or worse in the far-flung Middle East
where extremists are plotting to bomb us, shoot us, or poison our
water systems. The only difference to the terrorists that await
Americans is that now they are allegedly targeting a person’s
ideological beliefs.

    According to Cohen, “the most significant terrorist threat facing
the U.S. today comes from individuals or lone offenders, and small
groups of individuals who based on an ideological belief system,
primarily an ideological belief system they self-connect with online
activity, but they’ll go out and commit an act of violence on behalf
of that belief or a combination of ideological beliefs, or a
combination of ideological beliefs and personal grievances.”

What does this mean for Americans?

It means that the Feds can target individuals for expressing
anti-government sentiments.

    “In many respects, this is a much more individualized threat, and
what I mean by that is if you look at the lethal attacks that have
occurred in the U.S. over the last several years, they have been
conducted by individuals who spend incredible amounts of time online
viewing extremist content, content about past violent attacks, they
tend to be individuals who have shared behavioral health or
environmental characteristics,” Cohen said.

Targeting people for their ideological beliefs is horrifying in and of
itself. Biden’s new domestic terror law will also give law enforcement
the right to target people based on their behaviors.

    “What we mean by that, yes, the motive and ideological beliefs are
important as part of the analytic process, but the threat tends to
come from individuals who have a very superficial understanding of the
ideological belief system they use as the validation for an act of
violence, but they do have shared behavioral characteristics,” Cohen
said.

If any of this is beginning to sound like China, one only need look at
Hong Kong to see the similarities. Speaking out in print against an
authoritative regime is an arrestable offense, demonstrating against
police brutality is an arrestable offense and so on.

As a recent Brietbart article pointed out, there is no “official
Pentagon definition of extremism.” So how can our government give more
powers to law enforcement to surveil and arrest suspected “domestic
extremists”?

Mike Berry, the general counsel for First Liberty Institute, said he
asked the Counter-Extremism Working Group (CEWG) how it intended to
define “extremism” and the answer he got was something to the effect
of: “We’re still working on that, we’ll probably take the existing
definition and expand it.” Berry said that response was “problematic.”

When an organization that backed President Trump warns people about
Biden’s new domestic terror law, it is time for all of us to take
notice.

Berry warned, “I just don’t know how you can reconcile the
Constitution with trying to criminalize someone’s thoughts and
beliefs.” And that is the crux of the problem.

When DHS counterterrorism chief Cohen goes on record saying, “There
have been several cases where individuals have not met the threshold
for domestic terror yet they eventually go out and commit an act of
violence”, they are admitting that this is another scam that the mass
media is only too happy to perpetuate.

When the Feds and the mass media started asking Americans to “enhance
domestic terrorism reporting” by reporting family members and
co-workers, you know law enforcement has become a mirror image of
other authoritarian regimes.

    “Our goal is to enhance domestic terrorism analysis and improve
information sharing throughout law enforcement at the federal, state,
local, Tribal, and territorial level, and where appropriate with
private sector partners.”

    “This involves creating contexts in which those who are family
members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and
avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have
perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards
violence,” the White House official said.

Imagine if I used the same logic that the Feds and law enforcement
use. It could go something like this:

One day, I looked outside my window and saw my neighbor talking to a
Black man and then I saw them talking to someone who appeared to be a
Muslim but I couldn’t see the person’s face because it was covered
with a hijab. Then I saw my neighbor putting anti-government and Black
Lives Matter signs in their front yard; they even put up a Pride flag.
The next day, my neighbor knocked on my front door asking me to sign a
police reform petition. Little did I know that my wife and kids had
already signed the petition.

The next day when I went to work, I overheard my co-workers saying
that they planned to march in a Black Lives Matter protest and asked
me to sign a police brutality petition.

So when I got off work I immediately called DHS’s new, “Be On The
Lookout For Domestic Terrorists” hotline and filed  reports on my
neighbors, my family and co-workers, I even called my local police
department and filed reports with the local Fusion Center. I did this
to protect my Homeland, because you never really know about a person’s
ideological beliefs and behaviors. (FYI, there is no domestic
terrorism hotline, yet.)

When did freedom of expression become a tool for law enforcement to
identify family members, friends, neighbors and co-workers as
potential extremists?

Giving law enforcement more powers to target people based on made-up
or junk science and unsound definitions of domestic terrorism has all
the earmarks of an ever-expanding police state that began 11 years
ago.