Brownstone Institute – reposted on Zero Hedge & many other websites
Did the Feds Label You a Covid “Violent Extremist?”
Biden administration policy-makers hated you more than you knew.
From the start of the Covid pandemic, I warned that the feds were vilifying anyone who failed to kowtow to the latest commands. In October 2023, I wrote: “Federal bureaucrats heaved together a bunch of letters to contrive an ominous new acronym for the latest peril to domestic tranquility. The result: AGAAVE—’anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism’—which looks like a typo for a sugar substitute. The FBI vastly expanded the supposed AGAAVE peril by broadening suspicion from ‘furtherance of ideological agendas’ to ‘furtherance of political and/or social agendas.’ Anyone who has an agenda different from Team Biden’s could be AGAAVE’d for his own good.”
Vague, catch-all federal definitions became a Pandora’s box that permitted politicians to denigrate vast numbers of Americans as dangerous extremists. The House Weaponization Subcommittee warned in 2023 that “the FBI appears to be complicit in artificially supporting the Administration’s political narrative” that domestic violent extremism is “the ‘greatest threat’ facing the United States.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently declassified a December 13, 2021, report by the National Counterterrorism Center. Gabbard’s version had a more honest title than the original version: “Declassified Biden Administration Documents Labeling COVID Dissenters, Others as ‘Domestic Violent Extremists.”
What did it take for Biden’s Brain Trust to covertly condemn people? Simply warning that “COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, especially for children, are part of a government or global conspiracy to deprive individuals of their civil liberties and livelihoods, or are designed to start a new social or political order.” After government lockdowns had destroyed millions of jobs, only the paranoid would fear the government would ever violate their liberties or subvert their livelihoods. No wonder that a top federal official told Newsweek in 2022: “We’ve become too prone to labeling anything we don’t like as extremism, and then any extremist as a terrorist.”
Biden policy-makers pretended that the surge in criticism of Covid policies was proof of the psychopathology of the president’s opponents. But in September 2021, Biden dictated that 100 million Americans working for private companies must get the Covid vaccine. The official counterterrorism report stated that it anticipated that “the threat will continue at least into the winter, as many of the new COVID-19 mandates in the U.S…are implemented, including US workplace vaccination policies that carry disciplinary or termination penalties.” The Supreme Court struck down most of that vaccine mandate as illegal in January 2022, but not before it had profoundly disrupted legions of lives and businesses, as well as American health care.
The official report warned that “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists…characterize COVID-19 vaccination and mask mandates as evidence of government overreach.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito characterized the Covid dictates as “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” But that wasn’t “overreach” – it was simply public service.
Criticisms of Covid policies were turbocharged by the failure of the Covid vaccines. In early 2022, the effectiveness of the Covid booster shot had fallen to 31% – too low to have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Though most American adults had gotten Covid vaccines, there were more than a million new Covid cases a day in January 2022. Most Covid fatalities were occurring among the fully vaxxed. Studies showed that people who received multiple boosters were actually more likely to be hit by Covid infections.
So obviously, the Biden administration had no choice but to demonize any and all Covid critics. A confidential 2022 Department of Homeland Security report detailed pending crackdowns on “inaccurate” information on “the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines,” among other targets. A few months earlier, Jen Easterly, the chief of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, declared: “We live in a world where people talk about alternative facts, post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.” Plenty of Biden administration officials considered it “really dangerous” to permit people to assert that Covid vaccines were failing.
The National Counterterrorism Center report noted: “The availability of a vaccine for all school-age children might spur conspiracy theories and perceptions that schools will vaccinate children against parents’ will.” In the same way that some states and many school systems have sought to enable children to change their gender without their parents’ knowledge or consent? The report also warned that “new COVID-19 mitigation measures – particularly mandates or endorsements of vaccines for children – will probably spur plotting against the government.”
The FDA knew that Covid vaccines sharply increased the risk of myocarditis – an inflamed heart – in young males but the Biden White House browbeat the agency into fully approving the Covid vaccine anyhow. New York Governor Kathy Hochul sought unsuccessfully to mandate vaccines for all schoolkids in the Empire State even though her State Department of Health reported in May 2022 that the Pfizer vaccine was only 12% effective for children during the Omicron surge. The Biden administration included Covid vaccines in the semi-mandatory regimen for young children despite the vaccine’s failure and perils.
Portraying doubts on Covid policy as a warning sign of domestic violent extremism unleashed the FBI to target anybody who howled against mandatory injections or the near-total destruction of their freedom of movement.
That report is also a reminder that “extremism” has always been a flag of political convenience. In Washington, anyone who doesn’t worship government is considered an extremist. How far did officialdom go in smearing the American people?
In September 2022, President Biden made history with the first prime-time presidential speech with a backdrop inspired by the movie V for Vendetta and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Biden raved that his opponents were practically assassins waiting to finish off American democracy. A few hours before Biden’s speech, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, “When you are not with where the majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” This is a definition of extremism that could put the federal crosshairs on practically anyone who visits this website.
Actually, the feds used definitions of extremism that extended far beyond Covid controversies and undermined the First Amendment. Biden’s FBI targeted conservative Catholics who preferred to hear the Latin-language version of the mass, claiming they were potentially violent extremists. An FBI analysis portrayed rosaries as extremist symbols. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) stretched its “suspicious behavior” definition, warning banks to track “‘extremism’ indicators that include…the purchase of books (including religious texts),” according to a House Judiciary Committee report. Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) complained that the federal government “urged large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression.”
That December 13, 2021, National Counterterrorism Center report may be only the tip of the iceberg of federal mischief. We may soon learn of more direct federal machinations to vilify, undercut, or silence Covid critics.
Biden-era crackdowns and the newly declassified report should spur Americans to ask: What if the government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?
An earlier version of this post was published at The Libertarian Institute
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