In a recent terror bulletin, DHS tied domestic terrorism to free speech and protests. No such connection was made during Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests. DHS Counterterrorism Coordinator John Cohen defended it on the 15th at an online event hosted by George Washington U’s Program on terrorism, The Epoch Times reported.
The bulletin linked the violence to people speaking about immigration, race, and mandates.
“We have tied those narratives specifically to the overwhelming majority of domestic violent extremism incidents,” he said. “These narratives have, in fact, inspired violence.”
According to Cohen, the threats of information are coming from all directions.
“We also see efforts from ‘foreign and domestic threat actors’ to exacerbate fractures in society by promoting content online and through different parts of the media ecosystem for the purposes of sowing discord, undermining the credibility of the government, and undermining our relationship with allies,” he said.
“And these socio-political narratives they’re promoting online have actually encouraged acts of violence.”
The Left has been after our free speech rights for decades.
Again, the DHS rep claimed that conspiracy theories cause terrorism. He wants to put a chill on free speech.
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“Our job’s not to police thought,” he said deceptively. “Our job is to prevent acts of violence. We don’t monitor individuals engaging in constitutionally protected speech.”
In other words, they will decide what is constitutionally protected speech.
“We’ve put in place a series of protections to make sure that as we’re evaluating online content, it’s only relating to threats, and we’re only handling that information in a privacy, civil liberties-protective way.”
Cohen also spoke about the DHS’s warning about trucker protests ahead of the Super Bowl, which was never going to happen since it never went beyond a twitter meme. He said the DHS memo discouraged it. What a joke this guy is.
“When you start seeing woven into the threads of the planning of these events actual calls for specific violence—referring to the Super Bowl as the ‘Satanic Bowl,’ using calls that coincided with threats against the pharmaceutical industry and government institutions—then it’s something that we have to evaluate and track,” he said.
Maybe that happened and maybe it didn’t. The DHS can’t be trusted. They are letting an invasion go on at our border.
There were no terrorism events at the Feb. 13 Super Bowl—a fact Cohen attributed to the DHS’s memo.
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