by Andrea Widburg
Whether at the Department of Homeland Security or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the changes are not subtle, and the results can't be good.
Two odd little reports appeared in the past couple of days, both of which involve the federal government redefining things that, before the Biden administration, had mostly agreed-upon definitions that were not hostile to ordinary Americans and that recognized American sovereignty. One report concerns a changed terrorism definition from the Department of Homeland Security, while the other redefines the mission of the Department of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The Department of Homeland Security promulgated a new National Terrorism Advisory Systems (NTAS) bulletin. The terrorists are no longer radical student groups seeking to blow up the government (groups such as the Weathermen, which Obama's mentor, Bill Ayers, founded) or Islamic fundamentalist groups seeking a new caliphate bathed in American blood.
The new terrorist threat is...you. It's now official government policy that "misinformation" — which means disagreeing with the Biden administration, the media, and tech tyrants — is proto-terrorism. That's how we end up with this February 7, 2022, NTAS bulletin (emphasis mine):
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) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation. While the conditions underlying the heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, the convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment: (1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions[.] ...
[snip]
The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions:
- For example, 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.
As Thomas Lifson wrote yesterday, this "sounds precisely like a prelude to a totalitarian crackdown on political dissent."
Regarding COVID, as Democrats are finally turning on masks (except for masking students, who are least at risk), we can confidently say that every single bit of "information" that the Biden administration pushed out was, in fact, misinformation: the administration (and its holdovers from the Trump presidency) were wrong about the virus's origins (or lied about them), about therapeutics, about masks, about lockdowns, and about the vaccines' efficacy. Everything they said was wrong. But if you doubted or still doubt them, you are a terror threat.
Thomas Lifson adds: As my friend David Kahn emailed:
The Administration claims that its withdrawal from Afghanistan was a "great success". That would make those who criticize the Presidents withdrawal as an inept disaster the promoters of misleading information who are undermining the government and its institutions and thus terrorist threats. And the President himself regularly criticizes our government institutions including most recently the United States Senate and its filibuster rule going so far as to call it a relic of the Jim Crow era. And he has likened members of the Senate to the infamous Bull Connor and other Jim Crow officials. Biden has proclaimed that the federal elections to be conducted in 2022 will be unreliable and unfair if his proposed election reform act is not enacted. But apparently he believes that when such criticisms are made by private citizens they are terrorist threats.
Likewise, in the year since January 6, we've learned that it was anything but an insurrection, and certainly nothing near as bad as the BLM and Antifa riots in 2020. I won't beat that dead horse, but I urge you to check out this Revolver article.
Image: Stop the mandate protest in St. Paul, August 28, 2021, by Hayley Tschetter (with added text). CC BY-SA 2.0.
Do you feel intimated knowing that the government has effectively announced that, if you point out everything as to which it's been wrong and is continuing to be wrong, you will be viewed as a potential domestic terrorist? You're certainly meant to feel that way.
And
just yesterday, Townhall's Spencer Brown caught a significant change to
the mission statement for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services:
As of today, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has a new mission statement. Under Biden, USCIS removed mention of "lawful immigration," "protecting Americans," or "securing the homeland" and now simply "...upholds America’s promise as a nation of welcome..." pic.twitter.com/flN0NPr4Q7
— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) February 9, 2022
The old version:
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nation's lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.
That's straightforward enough: America is a nation of laws, some of which govern immigration, and the USCIS is responsible for enforcing those laws fairly and in a way that protects Americans and America.
The new version is much shorter:
USCIS upholds America's promise as a nation of welcome and possibility with fairness, integrity, and respect for all we serve.
Suddenly, USCIS is unconcerned with the rule of law and unconcerned with protecting Americans. It is, instead, an organization that exists to make life easier for the millions of illegal aliens the Biden administration is encouraging to enter America and then, once they are in America, funding and resettling them in districts that willfully refuse to vote for Democrats.
In other words, the Biden administration has stood America on its head: those who dare to disagree with the administration are potential terrorists — and please, ignore the whole First Amendment "shtick" about the federal government being barred from "abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In Biden's America, the Constitution has grown beyond such petty things as individual liberty.
Meanwhile, even as the government is intimidating ordinary Americans into abandoning their right to protest their government, it's making it patently clear that its immigration agency exists for the benefit of illegal aliens, not American citizens.
Never before in American history have we had an American government that is a mob-style enforcement agency against citizens and one, moreover, that happily fulfills that role because it so patently hates the citizens over whom it has this power.
Andrea Widburg
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/time_to_worry_the_biden_government_is_redefining_core_principles.html
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