Resisting Our National Security State: Good News, Bad News

Zerohedge today has a republished article that plays into the Newsweek bombshell story yesterday about America’s Political Police, the FBI, targeting “MAGA Republicans”. I think that’s some sort of official designation. Anyway, the Zerohedge artice—which I recommend in its entirety—starts off with an item that I’ve been wondering about. Remember how Tucker Carlson was trying to arrange an interview with President Putin? What ever happened with that? Well …

Contempt For Press Freedoms: US Officials Bar Tucker Carlson From Interviewing Putin

Authored by Ted Galen Carpenter via AntiWar.com,

Tucker Carlson reports that the U.S. government prevented him from interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin.  Carlson told the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche that he had sought to arrange an interview with Putin, but U.S. officials blocked him.

“I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, but the U.S. government prevented me from doing so. Think about [the implications],” Carlson told the newspaper on September 24.  Worse, according to Carlson, no one in the U.S. news media supported his right as a journalist to report on the Russian leader’s views regarding the Ukraine conflict.

I’m not sure how that works—Tucker doesn’t expand on that at the link. The point is that official efforts at thought control continue unabated. Most of the rest of the article is recent historical in focus, but it does highlight the Security State’s technique of censorship by proxy:

However, censorship by proxy has become by far the U.S. national security state’s preferred method.  The U.S. national security apparatus has even actively assisted Volodymr Zelensky’s Ukrainian regime to undermine the constitutional rights of Americans.  CNN noted a worrisome revelations in a July 2023 report from the House Judiciary Committee.  “The committee says SBU [Ukraine’s top security agency] sent the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly ‘spread Russian disinformation,’ and that the FBI then ‘routinely relayed these lists to the relevant social media platforms, which distributed the information internally to their employees in charge of content moderation and enforcement.’”

In other words, the FBI served as a willing conduit and facilitator for Kyiv’s overseas censorship efforts.  Moreover, U.S. officials did not make even a minimal effort to vet Kyiv’s allegations before pressuring social media companies to shut down the accounts of targeted organizations and individuals.

So, with that intro, let’s turn to Newsweek—this is more of the Bad News. They’re not giving up, they’re at war with the country:

Exclusive: Donald Trump Followers Targeted by FBI as 2024 Election Nears

This is a pretty detailed article and requires a close reading. Let’s start with the generalities. Here’s the first paragraph:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.

“Donald Trump’s Army”? Is that what those enormous crowds are, the people who turn out for Trump rallies?

Now, the Newsweek claim may sound far fetched—or maybe not—but they do present some interesting data to make their case. Newsweek quotes an anonymous current FBI official. That’s interesting in and of itself. Presumably, a current official would have had permission to speak to Newsweek, and there is no indication that the FBI in any way disavowed the official’s views, and the official concedes that they FBI is focusing on Zhou’s bugaboo of “MAGA Republicans”:

The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.

So, the FBI is concerned that a lot of Americans might misunderstand what they’re up to. Which is totally understandable, considering that few Americans actually think J6 was a terrorism event. What seems to be going on is that the FBI is responding to the prompting of the Ruling Class.

The FBI’s claim, or cover story, is that they’re targeting “violent extremism,” not free speech or political views. The problem with that claim is twofold. First, we’ve seen that a now standard Leftist ploy is to redefine “violence” and “terrorism” to include speech that they disagree with. And the FBI seems to buy into that. Despite the thorough debunking of the Russia Hoax, that hoax is still being propagated by Hillary and others, and it appears that the hoax serves as the basis for the FBI’s efforts to silence dissent from the proxy war on Russia—doing the SBU’s bidding—as well as the obstruction of Tucker Carlson’s planned interview of President Putin. The second problem has to do with FBI procedures—more on that below.

Now, Newsweek does a pretty good job of sampling the type of extremely divisive rhetoric we’re getting from the Ruling Class these days—they quote Dems, but you can count GOPe types in on most of this. In general, you’ll be a bit surprised at the the stress on things like “the soul of this country” and “national identity”. It’s the kind of stuff that if Trump had said it, but wait—you’ve heard that one before. Consider:

"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country," President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. "MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future," Biden said.

Really? No Dem has ever challenged the legitimacy of an election? I thought the standard Dem mantra is that requiring voter IDs renders an election illegitimate.

Biden's Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said: "The use of violence to pursue political ends is a profound threat to our public safety and national security...it is a threat to our national identity, our values, our norms, our rule of law—our democracy."

Yo, Bluto Barr! Antifa? BLM? The trashing of DC during the Trump inaugural, the trashing of Portland, the Summer of Violence?

For Attorney General Merrick Garland: "Attacks by domestic terrorists are attacks on all of us collectively, aimed at rending the fabric of our democratic society and driving us apart."

Pretty cynical but, sure enough, the FBI (and DHS) appear to buy into the narrative. Just this June, the two Political Police agencies reported to Congress on the supposed terrorism problem:

The FBI and DHS report concludes: "Sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence."

So the FBI is monitoring “sociopolitical developments.” They want Congress to believe that, even now, “conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic … will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence." And they think that other people are the “conspiracy theorists”! As Newsweek points out:

The threats listed in that paragraph are all clearly associated with America's right and in particular with Trump's MAGA supporters.

In spite of the widespread violence from the Left, the FBI only sees a danger from Trump supporters. Get a load of this direct quote of an FBI official—and Newsweek specifically states that this was offered in defense of FBI policy:

"Obviously if Democratic Party supporters resort to violence, it would apply to them as well. It doesn't matter that there is a low likelihood of that. So yes, in practical terms, it refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan."

And so it should be no surprise that, in a document issued in January, the FBI is now targeting people with “anti-authority” attitudes or who seek the "furtherance of political and/or social agendas." Remember those “Question Authority” bumper stickers? Don’t do that. Of course, they want you to believe that the nexus is the advocacy of violence. But … there’s a bit more:

"We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security."

A threat to national security. That would be Tucker Carlson, for example. Or dissent from the proxy war on Russia. That kind of threat to national security—as defined by the FBI—could get you censored or otherwise messed with in the public square of opinion sharing. Anonymously.

Newsweek does an examination of the trendlines in the FBI’s use of Full Investigations and Preliminary Investigations, and shows that those numbers have decline signficantly in the past few years, which seems reassuring. On the other hand, there has been a huge increase in Threat Assessments. That’s a category that just started up around the time I retired. Back then, nobody was sure what to make of it. The thing about Threat Assessments is that they can be opened more or less on spec. Does an FBI manager need to show that his squad is fully occupied? Opening a bunch of Threat Assessments might be one way to do that. We’ve seen that they sort of number jiggering does go on:

Assessments are the most speculative of any FBI investigation, where a special agent or intelligence analyst only suspects wrongdoing because of association or encounter and further looks into someone's background. Assessments are the closest thing to domestic spying that exists in America and generally not talked about by the Bureau.

Any information collected is permanent, of course. C’mon—you didn’t really think negative investigations were purged, did you? And here’s another thought. When the FBI wants someone to be censored in some way at some social media site, the site usually asks for a reason. Having an open Threat Assessment—sorry, can’t give you the details, they’re classified—could help justify censoring. I’m only guessing.

Not everyone buys into this narrative:

Some experts, such as Brian Michael Jenkins, question whether conceiving of disgruntled Americans as terrorists is even a helpful exercise. "These are not people who are going underground," he says, referring to domestic terrorist organizations of the past such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground or the IRA or Red Brigades overseas. As Jenkins sees it, those we label as domestic terrorists—people marching with guns or those wearing military-like uniforms—are more performative than indicative of some true terrorism class in America. "This is not the '60s or '70s," when radical groups, even the civil rights and peace movements, were driven to violence," Jenkins says. "I don't think terrorism is a particularly useful framework for viewing this problem."

But usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. For agencies eager to increase their manpower, their budgets, for ambitious politicians eager to suppress the competititon, labeling lots of your fellow Americans as terrorists or Putin’s puppets or purveyors of disinformation can be a very useful framework, indeed. And then there are the zealots, the Gramscian true believers.

There’s lots more, and it’s worth reading and pondering. Overall it’s a thoughtful article.

That was the bad news, but there’s good news on this front today. The importance of the decision we discuss below is that much of the “domestic terrorism” and “national security” narratives described above are probably not intended so to lock people up, as to shut down their speech. And that’s exactly what this case is about.

Fifth Circuit Corrects Critical Error In Prior Ruling To Shut Down Deep-State Censorship Tactic

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals expanded the size and scope of its injunction against the government’s central censorship arm.

In a bombshell ruling, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has shut down the “nerve center” of federal government-led speech policing, correcting a critical error in its prior jurisprudence and striking a major blow for the First Amendment and against deep-state election interference.

The court’s opinion comes in the landmark free speech case in the digital era, Missouri v. Biden.

This decision was actually a rehearing, brought about because the plaintiffs spotted that the key agency involved in censorship had been left out of the injunction. That agency was a Department of Homeland Security sub-agency, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The otherwise little-known agency, tasked with defending physical and digital infrastructure, had taken as its highest mission defending “our cognitive infrastructure,” in the words of current Director Jen Easterly.

…

Wrongthink, classified by the security state as “mis-, dis-, and mal-information,” about or in any way related to infrastructure that CISA exists to defend, would be treated as a threat to that infrastructure, and therefore as ripe to be neutralized through state-driven censorship.

The hook that CISA used was the claim that it needed to police speech, i.e., “mis-, dis-, and mal-information,” on our digital infrastructure because: national security. The author goes on to describe how CISA acted as the “nerve center” coordinating all the government censorship efforts.

In issuing its revised opinion, the Fifth Circuit noted that CISA had in fact likely violated the First Amendment in “coerc[ing] or significantly encourag[ing] social-media platforms to moderate content” beginning during the 2020 presidential election.

Therefore, the panel ruled that like the censorious Biden White House, CDC, and FBI, CISA too would be subject to a preliminary injunction prohibiting it from engaging in any action that would cause social media companies to suppress “protected free speech.”

Note the part about “during the 2020 presidential election. The entire permanent government—notably including Bluto Barr’s DoJ—had united to oust Trump, including through control of the information flow:

As journalist Molly Ball put it in her story on “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” to “fortify” that contest, “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” endeavored to “control the flow of information.” The evidence shows that the “cabal” included the deep state itself.

This is a very big decision, and it’s likely far from over:

Having appealed the Fifth Circuit’s original ruling to the Supreme Court, all indications are that the feds will appeal the modified ruling to that venue as well.

Anticipating that effort, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey tweeted in the wake of the revised ruling, “We look forward to defending your First Amendment rights at the nation’s highest court.”

If so, the case will arrive at the highest court in the land with the plaintiffs’ central argument having been vindicated now at the district and appellate levels — that argument being that by leaning on social media platforms with the threat of a government gun to censor ideas the government doesn’t like, the government violated our right to free speech.

So far, so very good news.