This latest barrage on American liberty comes in the fashion of an ABC Studios drama
that demonizes a Texas militia group as radical right-wing fanatics,
lifting it's story from last year’s arrest of Hutaree militia members
in Michigan who were charged with planning to kill police officers and were later acquitted
of all charges. A fact that the mainstream media chose to ignore and
instead continues to focus on the "danger of militia groups" when in
fact the United States was founded on the principal that citizens must
form a militia in order to prevent government from becoming tyrranical.
It has been documented several now how under the Obama
administration, the characterization of Americans that distrust
overbearing government control over their lives and insist an adherence
to constitutionalist principles as domestic extremists and terrorists
has been rapidly accelerating.
Recently a study funded by the Department of Homeland
Security characterized any American who is “suspicious of centralized
federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme
right-wing” terrorists.
Entitled Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008 (PDF),
the study was produced by the National Consortium for the Study of
Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. The
Department of Homeland Security assisted this organization's beginning
with funding aid in the amound of $12 million of our tax dollars.
This new report bases it's findings on a 2011 study entitled Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism, produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, in which the following characteristics are used to identify terrorists.
- Americans who believe their “way of life” is under attack;
- Americans who are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”;
- People who consider themselves “anti-global” (presumably those who are wary of the loss of American sovereignty);
- Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”;
- Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty”;
- People who “believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.”
<script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client="pub-2358160915469542"; google_ad_host="pub-1556223355139109"; google_ad_width=728; google_ad_height=90; google_ad_format="728x90_as"; google_ad_type="text_image"; google_ad_host_channel="0001"; google_color_border="1C1C1C"; google_color_bg="1C1C1C"; google_color_link="FF9900"; google_color_url="999999"; google_color_text="CCCCCC"; //--></script> The report also lists people opposed to abortion and “groups that seek to smite the purported enemies of God and other evildoers” as terrorists. Former Congressman Bob Barr responded to the study by labeling it a “frightening” and “bizarre” example of how “government officials seem to have become increasingly distrustful of individual liberty.”
“The report may appear innocuous, but it is not. It offers a carefully scripted but insidious analysis of Americans who happen to hold certain philosophical or political views, many of which are common among conservatives and libertarians,” wrote Barr who is not alone among his peers who believe that these reports are demonstrating a clear and consistent pattern in a move to “rush to denounce legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes.”
Eventually this story was picked up by the Drudge Report where the story took on a life of its own, prompting scorn from conservatives across the spectrum, including a Washington Times reporter named Wesley Pruden who's article was entitled The new terrorists — they’re all of us.
A popular site known as "Infowars" has previously documented how on numerous occasions how federal authorities and particularly the Department of Homeland Security have been producing an avalanche of literature which characterizes American's who advocate small government as terrorists because they believe in the founding principals established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
This ongoing and consistent pattern has been rapidly accelerating recently and further illustrates a desire by government bearucrats to denounce legitimate political beliefs, or even mundane behaviors, as thought crimes, by insinuating the same beliefs are shared by terrorists.
As documented by the FBI’s Communities Against Terrorism program, the bulk purchase of food is now labeled as a potential indication of terrorist activity as well as anyone paying cash for a cup of coffee, and showing an interest in internet privacy especially when using the Internet in public places.
The federal government has been routinely characterizing mundane behavior as extremist activity or a potential indicator of terrorist intent. In the recent program established by the Department of Homeland security as part of its ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign, they are attempting to educate the public that the normal activities of millions of people every day are all potential signs of terrorist activity including using a video camera in public, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and "using a cell phone recording application”.
The Department of Homeland Security drew criticism over a controversy last year when it released a series of videos promoting the See Something, Say Something campaign in which nearly all of the "terrorists" portrayed in the Public Service Announcements were white Americans.
Despite encouraging viewers not to pay attention to a person’s race in determining whether or not they may be a terrorist, almost all of the scenarios in the clip proceed to portray white people as the most likely terrorists. What is even more bizzare is that nearly every single one of the “patriotic” Americans who reports on their fellow citizen were either black, Asian or Arab. If the video had portrayed every terrorist as an Arab and every patriotic snoop as white, there’d be an outcry and rightly so, yet this strange reversal must have been deliberate on the part of the DHS, but why? Is this merely political correctness taken to the extreme or is something deeper at work?
In addition to rhetoric from the likes of Vice-President Biden that Tea Partiers are akin to “terrorists,” other legitimate grass roots activists such as End the Fed protesters have also been labeled as dangerous extremists by the federal government while President Obama and other Democrats have lended support to the Occupy Wall Street movement which openly calls for a move toward Socialistic Communism.
In March 2009 it came to light that the End the Fed protests, which took place at banks and regional Federal Reserve branches across the country the previous year on November 22, were being monitored closely by the United States Army Reserve Command, who implied that those protesting against the Fed and the record breaking bank bailouts were essentially terrorists.
On November 22, 2008, Alex Jones led a rally at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas Texas. The Dallas protest is specifically mentioned in the official Army document where Ron Paul’s brother was also in attendance.
The FBI has also gone out of its way to characterize returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan as a major domestic terrorist threat. Additionally, Janet Napolitano said she stood by an April 2009 DHS intelligence assessment that listed returning vets as likely domestic terrorists.
Just a month later, the New York Times reported on how Boy Scout Explorers were being trained by the DHS to kill “disgruntled Iraq war veterans” in terrorist drills.
In March 2009 we broke the story of the infamous MIAC report, leaked to us by two concerned Missouri police officers. The report listed Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, people who display bumper stickers, people who own gold, or even people who fly a U.S. flag and equates them with radical race hate groups and terrorists.
Indeed, the MIAC report is just one in a series of similar threat assessment documents released over the last decade that list average American citizens as dangerous extremists and potential terrorists. This characterization stretches back long before the Obama administration came to power.
We have highlighted previous training manuals issued by state and federal government bodies which identify whole swathes of the population as potential terrorists. A Texas Department of Public Safety Criminal Law Enforcement pamphlet gives the public characteristics to identify terrorists that include buying baby formula, beer, wearing Levi jeans, carrying identifying documents like a drivers license and traveling with women or children.
A Virginia training manual used to help state employees recognize terrorists lists anti-government and property rights activists as terrorists and includes binoculars, video cameras, paper pads and notebooks in a compendium of terrorist tools.
Such training documents are manifesting real-life situations where people are being harassed, assaulted and arrested by law enforcement simply for owning material or discussing topics related to the Constitution and the bill of rights.
In May 2008, a student of a large bible college in east Texas was accused by federal agents of committing an “act of terror and espionage” after he gave a talk to a group of Boy Scouts in which he encouraged them to educate themselves about the U.S. constitution.
In July 2007, the Kuhns, a North Carolina couple, were terrorized by sheriff’s deputy Brian Scarborough, who broke into their house, assaulted them and then arrested the couple for the crime of flying an upside down U.S. flag.
The couple were handcuffed, arrested and bundled into a squad car, to the protests of numerous neighbors who demanded to know why the Kuhns were being incarcerated, but were told to leave by police.
As is supported by the United States Flag Code as well as a similar incident in 2001, flying the flag upside down is not a mark of disrespect, and in fact is considered by many to be the highest form of patriotism. Despite this fact, the upside down flag is equated in the MIAC report with terrorist paraphernalia.
Alex Jones’ 2001 documentary film 9/11: The Road to Tyranny featured footage from a FEMA symposium given to firefighters and other emergency personnel in Kansas City in which it was stated that the founding fathers, Christians and homeschoolers were terrorists and should be treated with the utmost suspicion and brutality in times of national emergency.
The lecturer identifies George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers as “terrorists”.
In 2004, Kelly Rushing was charged with making “terroristic threats” after he handed out Alex Jones videos and recordings of a Congressman Ron Paul speech on C-Span to Lyon County, Kentucky officials and Kentucky StateTrooper Lewis Dobbs.
A jury later ruled in favor of Rushing but he continues to be harassed by authorities and local law enforcement.
In August 2008, a Las Vegas couple were stopped by police, detained and searched as cops demanded to know if there was anything illegal inside the vehicle. When the couple asked why they had been stopped, the police officer pointed at “Infowars” and “Ron Paul” bumper stickers on their car.
In 2001, housewife Abbey Newman was assaulted and arrested by police at a checkpoint for exercising her 4th amendment rights. Cops looked through literature which included a copy of a pocket constitution and debated whether or not the material was illegal.
The last decade has seen a deliberate intensification of the talking point that American citizens who are informed about their constitutional rights should somehow be treated with suspicion as potential extremists or even terrorists.
This demonization campaign has accelerated so quickly under the Obama administration that conservative middle class Americans are now being targeted by the federal government as the primary terror threat, a process that also serves to chill the very constitutional rights upheld by such “extremists”.
Only by becoming aware of how far this agenda has advanced and mounting a huge public relations backlash against it can politically active Americans prevent themselves from becoming victims of a new type of McCarthyism that threatens to intimidate the liberty movement out of existence.
