Aug. 9, 2019
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
After El Paso and Dayton, are we about to unleash the thought police on the American people?
Is the federal government
going to be regulating hate speech on social media after the El Paso and Dayton shootings? President Donald Trump says
he is “directing the Department of Justice to work in… partnership with local,
state, and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop
tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.” Sounds like another
mass surveillance program to find terrorists in our soup. Are we witnessing the
birth of the thought police—again?
Cartoon: Forward March
Are Democrats about to walk
off a cliff in their reckless pursuit of impeaching President Donald Trump?
Trump sanctions on Venezuela put the pressure on, 90-day waiver for U.S. oil interests should be extended indefinitely
Americans for Limited
Government President Rick Manning: “President Trump is wisely imposing economic
sanctions and tightening the financial screws on the exceedingly corrupt
Nicolas Maduro regime In Venezuela. However countries like China and Russia
have been actively working against the U.S. by sending billions into Venezuela,
financially propping-up Maduro’s failed Socialist regime. Most importantly,
President Trump has shown a strategic deftness in extending a 90 day waiver to
U.S. energy companies operating in Venezuela, a country that presently controls
access to the world’s largest known oil reserves. China and Russia crave both Venezuela’s oil
and the geopolitical foothold it provides in the southern Caribbean less than
3,000 miles off our America’s Gulf Coast, and the President’s actions send a
clear signal their continued meddling will not stand.”
Roberto Wakerell-Cruz: Antifa-supporting mass shooter presents a challenge to apologist media
“In this sense, we see a
far-left Antifa version of the idea. For a new, just society to arise, the
status-quo must first be undermined to the point where it collapses. By leaving
his account open for the masses to see, it creates a swarm of interest that
garners more media attention, and actually stokes the flames underneath Antifa,
further justifying this as an atrocity committed by ‘the left.’ Like Alfred
Pennyworth said in the Dark Knight, ‘Some men just want to watch the world
burn.’ This is the ethos of the accelerationist ideology, an ideology which is
not exclusive to the far-right, as the SPLC would like you to believe.”
After El Paso and Dayton, are we about to unleash the thought police on the American people?
By Robert Romano
“[W]e must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs. I am directing the Department of Justice to work in… partnership with local, state, and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”
That was President Donald Trump in remarks on Aug. 5 following the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton that occurred within hours of one another, calling for the Justice Department to work with big tech companies to identify domestic terrorists.
Does this sound familiar? It should.
We have known since the Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 that the Justice Department, intelligence agencies and big tech companies that provide social media, email and phone services to the American people have a relationship as the U.S. has become a high tech surveillance state of sorts. These programs have had many names. Total Information Awareness, the Bush-era terrorist surveillance program, PRISM and so forth. All with the same stated aim: To somehow prevent terrorist attacks before they happen, by surveilling the American people at large directly.
Americans for Limited Government has stood against both warrantless surveillance programs and those administered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s rubber stamp judges that have been used on the American people and even political campaigns — the bogus surveillance of the Trump campaign on made-up allegations they were Russian agents being the most prominent example — precisely because they appear to be facially unconstitutional, their effectiveness is unknown and the potential for political abuse has been proven.
These tools have been advocated for in the wake of past terrorist attacks and so in that context the President’s call for the Justice Department to surveil social media for potential threats is unsurprising in the wake of the recent attacks.
I suppose it is worth noting that when conservative members of Congress, such as Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), or President Trump call for declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization after the Tacoma, Wash. firebombing, or to shut down their social media, or to surveil mosques in the U.S. and their followers or radical Islamist websites, this is precisely what they are asking for (whether they realize it or not). It demands surveillance of domestic political extremists.
Now, surely, after El Paso and Dayton, attacks perpetrated by a right-wing, anti-Hispanic, racist white supremacist who targeted Hispanics because they were Hispanics and a left-wing pro-Antifa ideologue who thought his political opponents were Nazis who deserved to die, both of whom kept active social media presences, the focus is going to be on online instances of advocating violence and hate speech.
Here’s the problem. There is a lot of advocacy of violence on the internet and social media. And wasting time in these forums or on social media is most certainly going to turn up lots of radical, hateful, racist and extremist sentiments from every side of the political spectrum, but very few real terrorists or mass shooters. The internet and social media can be a dumpster fire. There are a lot of sickos out there, but in most cases they’re not actually engaging in violence, even when they’re advocating for it.
Yes, some of the mass shooters and other attempted attacks of recent memory certainly have kept up active social media presences. It is a part of the profile, and these types of postings are certainly becoming more common. It’s standard fare.
So, good luck to the Justice Department or social media companies separating bluster from actual imminent threats. How do you find the needles in the haystack? It’s science fiction. For example, just check out the #Treason and #TrumpTreason hashtags on Twitter and you’ll see what I’m talking about. These are Americans that believe their political opponents are guilty of treason, which is a capital crime, and I suppose who think they ought to be executed. Are those incitements to political violence? The Justice Department could spend the next hundred years investigating every instance of advocacies of political violence on the internet and social media and find very few real, imminent threats.
That is why, even with the tools at the federal government’s disposal and programs like PRISM, it is not possible to prevent every terrorist attack. And it is also why social media companies appear to spend an inordinate amount of time targeting speech that is most probably benign.
For example, James Woods was censored on Twitter because he posted “#HangThemAll” in reference to those federal agents who participated in the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory investigation who he thought might be traitors for pursuing false allegations.
The Mitch McConnell campaign had its Twitter account suspended because they posted a video to criticize extremists who were calling for violence against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The_Donald subreddit group on Reddit, the largest pro-Trump subreddit, got quarantined because a tiny number of posters there advocated violence against police and government officials. The vast majority of 773,000 posters there are pro-law enforcement, but that doesn’t matter. Reddit said the subreddit was quarantined because the moderators did not remove a few posts out of the tens of thousands that are posted every day, and yet the posts in question were never even reported to the moderators.
President Trump is well aware of how social media companies are suppressing conservatives in the name of eradicating hate speech. He just hosted a social media summit at the White House in July where he declared, “Big tech must not censor the voices of the American people,” adding, “I’m directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free-speech rights of all Americans.”
The President noted the removal of tweets by Twitter of actor James Woods as an example of the type of censorship taking place, saying, “James Woods. I don’t know James, but he’s an interesting guy and he’s a conservative guy. And he is a straight shooter. He’s tough. But when they want to take him off — and other people like him; many in this room, some in this room — it’s a very, very bad — it’s a very bad thing.”
In the meantime, groups that openly advocate violence against perceived political opponents like Antifa have widespread social media presences on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Many of the recent mass shooters had active social media profiles that were not policed by these big tech companies or reported to authorities in time to prevent their attacks. The point is, in the name of preventing supposed political extremism, social media companies are already proving they’re not very good at it. They flag false positives and ignore openly violent groups.
Meaning, even if the Justice Department and social media companies were to attempt to “develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,” they would most probably be ineffective and in the meantime be used to target unpopular speech and to engage in censorship. It already has. The people who would use these tools already think Trump supporters and Republicans are Nazis and white supremacists who do not deserve rights, and who want to label Christian, family-oriented groups as hate groups because they do not embrace gay marriage.
In short, it would mean we had invited the thought police to oversee our republic. Maybe we already have.
This is the reason why these mass surveillance programs have been considered a failure publicly but kept on being developed on the classified side of the question. This is the reason William Binney resigned from the NSA in 2001. What’s sick is that these same types of authorities including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were the ones used by the FBI to look into fictitious allegations that Trump and members of his campaign were Russian agents. What is frightening is the prospect that these authorities might now be turned on the American people — again.
Now, I do not believe that any of this is what President Trump has in mind, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For those who think these tools will be used for good, whatever can be used against groups you don’t like can also be turned against other groups you do like.
The fact is the federal government does not have a very good track record with operating these types of programs, and we have already seen an abundance of evidence they have been abused to target not those who are violent or pose any real threat to national security, but are political opponents. Trump knows this first hand, better than anyone.
We haven’t even cleaned up the prior messes left behind by foolish attempts to create a surveillance state and thought police. Let’s not create another mess, Mr. President.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
Cartoon: Forward March
By A.F. Branco
Click here fo ra higher level resolution version.
Trump sanctions on Venezuela put the pressure on, 90-day waiver for U.S. oil interests should be extended indefinitely
Aug. 8, 2019, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement praising President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela and urging the 90-day waiver for U.S. oil interests to be extended indefinitely:
“President Trump is wisely imposing economic sanctions and tightening the financial screws on the exceedingly corrupt Nicolas Maduro regime In Venezuela. However countries like China and Russia have been actively working against the U.S. by sending billions into Venezuela, financially propping-up Maduro’s failed Socialist regime. Most importantly, President Trump has shown a strategic deftness in extending a 90 day waiver to U.S. energy companies operating in Venezuela, a country that presently controls access to the world’s largest known oil reserves. China and Russia crave both Venezuela’s oil and the geopolitical foothold it provides in the southern Caribbean less than 3,000 miles off our America’s Gulf Coast, and the President’s actions send a clear signal their continued meddling will not stand.
“However, in order to assure long-term operational security when the duly elected government of Juan Guaido gains the levers of power in Caracas, it is essential that the 90 day waiver for the American energy industry be extended indefinitely. U.S. oil companies found and developed the fields in Venezuela in the 1920s, and by 1950, the South American country enjoyed the second largest GDP per capita in the world, behind only the United States. The murderous Maduro regime has accelerated the devastation of the nation’s economy begun by Hugo Chavez with the per capita GDP shrinking to levels not seen since 2000. While Maduro has taken a wrecking ball to Venezuela, maintaining basic U.S. interests in operating their oil fields will allow a democratic president Guaido to restore national prosperity, free from Chinese and Russian entanglement in Venezuela’s most precious financial asset – its vast oil wealth.”
ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from The Post Millenial’s Roberto Wakerell-Cruz, the mass shooters of El Paso and Dayton may be trying to cause American society to collapse to give rise to radical change:
Antifa-supporting mass shooter presents a challenge to apologist media
By Roberto Wakerell-Cruz
The United States was shaken to its very core this weekend. Two horrific massacres striking two small communities, one at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and one at a Bar & Grill in Dayton, Ohio.
As the world watched in horror at what has become an all-too-regular kind of tragedy in America, the news media began to piece together suspects. Though the motives for one have been made a bit more clear by the revelation of an online manifesto posted moments before the attack, the motives in Dayton remained a bit of a mystery, until internet sleuths did their digging.
Who was the Dayton shooter?
A Twitter account with the handle @IamtheSpookster started to gain an online head of steam, as users started to comb through nearly 10,000 tweets of his. The user looked strikingly similar to the shooter, the user was clearly in the Dayton area, and above all, the shooter appeared to have an interest in fringe political movements. Specifically, the far-left and Antifa.
Spookster, as he will be referred to in this article, was a deeply troubled person beyond this. According to multiple former classmates of the gunman, Spookster had been suspended from school for compiling a “hit list” of people he wanted to kill, and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to rape.
The list came to prevalence after police said there was nothing in the background of the 24-year-old Spookster that would have disabled him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle along with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire at a crowded Dayton bar.
A clearly troubled young man was able to get his hands onto a deadly weapon, and use it to cause mass pain. That’s sadly nothing new. Although the El Paso shooter’s intentions were much easier to read into, it takes a bit more investigating to fully understand.
An Antifa sympathizer?
Spookster both tweeted and retweeted a variety of posts that made his intentions much clearer. Antifascist posts, calls to arms, and sympathizing with terrorism were all clearly expressed.
Spookster retweeted sympathetic tweets about the Antifa terrorist “comrade” who entered an ICE facility in Washington, going so far as to call him a “martyr.” Spookster retweeted a post from a now-deleted account called “@tacticaldipshit,” which called for people who are being accused of terrorism “just for protesting” to instead “think about doing terrorist sh*t.”
Other tweets clearly show where his sympathies were on the recent Andy Ngo attack that took place in Oregon a few weeks ago. Ngo, a journalist who specializes in Antifa, was beaten by several masked members of Antifa at a street rally in Portland, to which he suffered a brain hemorrhage and a torn ear lobe, amongst other injuries.
Spookster retweeted a number of posts directly mocking Ngo which championed violence. “Arm, train, prepare” read one of his many posts. Other posts showed a direct obsession with what he perceived to be a growing neo-Nazi movement in America, with a willingness to deplatform those who Antifa deemed to be Nazis.
The account was all but confirmed to be the shooter’s when the account was deleted from Twitter, which has been commonplace for spree killers for years on the platform—Though that never used to be the case. To this day, one can still very easily find the Twitter account of one of the brothers who conducted the Boston Marathon Massacre, who Tweeted “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people” directly after detonating a bomb which killed three people and injured several hundred others.
Was there an Antifa-motive?
None of this explicitly explains why Spookster decided to do what he did. Killing his sister and others at a bar and grill doesn’t exactly scream Antifa “activism.” But perhaps more clues could be found in who Spookster was following.
His account originally showed that he followed over 1300 people. The last account followed by Spookster was @accelerbot, a bot account which retweets all tweets which use the keyword “accelerationism.”
A photo showing the account holder’s most recently followed account. “Accelerbot” retweets all tweets that mention the word “accelerationism.” The @accelerbot account was founded in March 2019, the same month as the New Zealand massacre. The term accelerationism was frequently used in the NZ shooter’s manifesto.
If “accelerationism” sounds familiar to you, there’s a good reason for it. The word came to prominence after the New Zealand Mosque shooter’s manifesto reached the public.
Accelerationism, in this sense, is defined as “the idea that violence should be used to push Western countries into becoming failed states. Adherents hope the collapse will give rise to radical, presently unthinkable changes in our society.”
The @accelerbot account was created in March 2019, the same month as the New Zealand massacre.
This is something that both the El Paso shooter and Spookster have in common. The El Paso shooter’s manifesto also included the word, as the term appears to be a new key that radicalized maniacs are using to rationalize such heinous actions.
The rise of accelerationism
In this sense, we see a far-left Antifa version of the idea. For a new, just society to arise, the status-quo must first be undermined to the point where it collapses. By leaving his account open for the masses to see, it creates a swarm of interest that garners more media attention, and actually stokes the flames underneath Antifa, further justifying this as an atrocity committed by “the left.” Like Alfred Pennyworth said in the Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” This is the ethos of the accelerationist ideology, an ideology which is not exclusive to the far-right, as the SPLC would like you to believe.
You may have noticed that when talking about how many people Spookster followed, we said that the account showed he “originally followed over 1300 people.” While the @iamspookster account was gaining notoriety across the web, the number quickly dipped lower and lower, ending at around 1250 before finally getting deactivated.
This is because of users who were followed by @iamthespookster who blocked him or deactivated their accounts, thus removing all retweets of theirs from Spookster’s timeline. Many people were quick to attempt to erase their association with the shooter. Most notably, Jared Hold of Right Wing Watch, a journalist who has been previously linked to Antifa.
Though the El Paso shooter has garnered attention as being a white supremacist who followed in the New Zealand shooter’s footsteps, it’s doubtful that Spookster’s media coverage will continue in that same vein. The continually soft coverage of Antifa and actions committed by their sympathizers will continue, and it would be a shock to no one if the coverage of this particular tragedy focused solely on gun control, rather than political violence. The scapegoat role for that cause has already been assigned to El Paso.
