New Revelations About America’s Speech Police Illustrate Challenges for Reformers of Deep State

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security building in Washington on July 22, 2019. (Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

One wonders how far a modern-day church Committee could realistically hope to get in reining in a deep state run as far amok as ours.

For a sobering window into just how systemic and fundamental the rot within our national security and intelligence apparatus is, and therefore how arduous any such effort to reform it would be, look no further than recent revelations from The Intercept about America’s literal speech police.

The progressive publication’s reporting on specific elements of the mis-, dis-, and mal-information jihad the U.S. government is executing—integral to its war on wrongthink—are dire enough in their own right. But what they reveal about the nature of the institutions, and the people who populate them, represents an even deeper and more daunting challenge with which would-be reformers would have to grapple.

The Intercept’s details of deep state chicanery are considerable. It reports that per a leaked copy of the Biden administration’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to target “inaccurate information” on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

What’s more, a raft of DHS subagencies from Customs and Border Protection to the Science and Technology Directorate and the Secret Service have all reportedly expanded their missions to include rooting out “disinformation.”

According to The Intercept, officials have been flagging such offending content on Facebook and Instagram, for the two platforms to suppress, via a secret portal only those with government or law enforcement email addresses can access.

These efforts build on those in the run-up to the 2020 election, still ongoing, in which government agencies both allegedly regularly coordinated with technology platforms on “content moderation,” and did the moderating (read: flouted the First Amendment) by proxy. During the race, agencies reported purported “misinformation”—4,800-plus items worth—circulating on social media to a third-party consortium, the Election Integrity Partnership, which conveyed such flagged content to the affected platforms. The socials censored at a 35 percent rate (pdf).

Diligent readers of the Constitution will search in vain for provisions authorizing this conduct. On the contrary, they will find language prohibiting it.

The efforts flow from a wholly un-American, if not anti-American, premise.

Our ruling class believes that as Dr. Anthony Fauci is to science, the ruling class is to the state. “We are democracy,” it thunders. “If you dare hold a view—any view—different from ours, you are not only anti-democratic, but dangerous.”

“Your wrongthink can lead to violence,” they say, “so we have a duty to police your thoughts. Go further than that, and we’ll pursue you like terrorists.”

The Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism makes the vision, under which our deep state operates, clear. It notes that a core priority of confronting “long-term contributors to domestic terrorism” includes:

“Enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence. ... Enhancing faith in American democracy demands accelerating work to contend with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse. We will work toward finding ways to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.”

This would seem to be the kind of thinking that pervades CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency—a key cog in the Election Integrity Partnership.

Founded in 2018, at first glance, you might think the DHS agency would be committed to defending against hacks of federal information systems or attacks on the electric grid.

But, like its parent, it has taken on a far more expansive role, and with a domestic focus.

It has used its mandate to protect critical national infrastructure, including around elections, to justify its speech-police-related activity.

Consider the view of its Biden-appointed director, Jen Easterly. She stated during a November 2021 conference, “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”

See, everything really is infrastructure to our betters in Washington—even your brain!

And unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats see it as their responsibility, as a matter of national security, therefore, to control the ideas you grapple with.

In the 2020 race, a CISA subsidiary, the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, “aided in the reporting process and in implementing resilience efforts to counter election misinformation,” according to the Election Integrity Partnership, with which it coordinated such reporting.

CISA undertook tasks such as developing a “rumor control” page to dispel purported mis- and disinformation around the election and, per The Intercept, participated in “weekly teleconferences to coordinate Intelligence Community activities to counter election-related disinformation.” (pdf) Those chats have reportedly continued biweekly.

In January 2021, the incoming Biden administration transitioned CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to a broader MDM—mis-, dis-, and malinformation—team, countering “all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events,” according to a CISA official (pdf).

The foreign focus had expanded to a domestic one, just as an agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure had expanded that definition to encompass the minds of Americans—and again, all as part of a DHS that was created to fight the global war on terror.

This should serve as a collective cautionary tale.

It’s almost a law of physics that bureaucracies, once put in power, will seek to grow their power, and that the more powerful they get, the more likely they are to abuse it. When it comes to government bureaucracies, almost invariably they’re staffed with those who believe in greater government control, and that they know better than those who they’re supposed to be serving.

Applied to the national security and intelligence apparatus, we see agencies with the most awesome powers abusing them in ever more brazen ways and increasingly training them on American citizens—in part because the bureaucrats believe they know best, that they have an obligation to keep us rubes safe from ourselves, and if nothing else that it’s imperative to aggressively pursue American wrongthinkers to protect their own power and privilege.

At the core is a cynical hubris: Our betters have a monopoly on “truth”—by which they mean that their narrative on a whole slew of hotly contested, often highly subjective, issues core to maintaining their power is the sole, politically correct one—and therefore that any competing narratives must be deep-sixed.

It’s a tall enough task to rein in big and powerful institutions. It’s made that much harder when they are populated by those endowed with the belief that they’re defenders of the one true secular anti-faith, and that neither law nor tradition is an obstacle to ensuring we submit to it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.