Shortly after the collapse of Joe Biden’s proposed Ministry of Truth and the hunt for so-called “domestic terrorists,” Democrats in Congress began looking for another workaround to allow them to use the power of the government to silence people with insufficiently woke opinions. In the House, Democrats quickly used the recent mass shooting in Buffalo as an excuse to craft a bill that would engage various elements of the Department of Homeland Security to “monitor domestic terrorism” threats, presumably including social media conversations. The bill narrowly passed on party lines with Adam Kinzinger (who else?) being the sole Republican to vote for it. But the bill’s prospects in the Senate look far more dubious. Josh Hawley has already referred to it as “the disinformation board on steroids.” Chuck Schumer is promising to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, but where he expects to find ten Republicans to go along with the idea is anybody’s guess. (The Hill)
Senate Republicans are lining up against a House-passed bill that would authorize special offices within the government to investigate and monitor domestic terrorism, which is being pushed in the wake of a racist shooting in Buffalo that left 10 people dead.
The GOP compares the proposal, which sets up offices in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and the FBI to target domestic terrorism, to the recently paused disinformation board set up by the Biden administration.
“It sounds terrible,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) of the House-passed bill, predicting it won’t get 10 Republicans in the Senate.
Everyone can see where this bill is going if it somehow passes. Democrats want to unleash DHS to surveil Americans and monitor political speech on the pretense of looking for people who might engage in acts of violence. If they were going to limit that authority to only people who are actively making threats or hatching plans for a violent attack of some sort, that would be one thing. But you know it doesn’t stop there. And people seen sharing such threats and plans can already be banned and reported to law enforcement.
Just as with the Ministry of Truth, the fly in the ointment involves who is allowed to define “domestic terrorism.” Just as with “disinformation,” the people who are allowed to define such terms would have a vast amount of power. And you know that this new program wouldn’t be paying any attention to BLM riots, CHOP zones, or attacks on police stations and courthouses in the name of “racial justice.” Nope. Those would just be considered “mostly peaceful protests.”
We also shouldn’t confuse the Democrats’ plans for any action by DHS that would actually reduce the number of mass shootings in the country. Barely a week after the Buffalo shooting there was another mass shooting in front of a crowded McDonald’s restaurant in Chicago. Nearly the same number of people were shot and two people died. But you didn’t hear a peep about it in the mainstream media or from Congressional Democrats. And you can rest assured it would not be of interest to the proposed DHS programs either. Do I really need to tell you why? Because it was Black people shooting Black people. That makes it a “local news story,” and not of interest in the broader debate.
I would be willing to wager that if you went and interviewed any of the people who were eating at McDonald’s that night you would find that they were pretty terrified. (The windows of the restaurant were shot out, showering glass on the diners.) And it happened in Chicago, so that makes it “domestic,” right? And yet it’s somehow not domestic terrorism and not worth the attention of the Democrats. Funny how that works.
Hawley is correct. This bill needs to be shut down and if any GOP senators vote in favor of it they will owe some answers to their constituents.
