By The Swoozler
A common theme with right wing conservatives is that they are for smaller government. This is demonstrably false.
George W. Bush grew government by one of the government’s largest ever Act, The Homeland Security Act. He created a cabinet level office for the Director of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security employs 240,000 people, with a budget of 104 billion dollars a year. It is the third largest such agency.
The Department is in charge of domestic terrorism, civil defense, immigration, customs, border security and cyber security. In reality, it is for spying on American citizens. It brings up comparisons to Nazi Germany’s “Fatherland” concept.
DHS is the operations arm of the Patriot Act. It collects mass surveillance data on all Americans, including, but not limited to, fingerprints, phone, text, emails, social connections, satellite imagery, and bank and health records.
In the year leading up to the passage of the Act, a pilot program called Total Information Awareness was developed. It was soundly rejected by Congress, because it monitored every American.
One of the major unwritten acts taken by the DHS was to pimp up fear of terrorism in the country. Its first director, Tom Ridge, developed the Homeland Advisory System.
The System was a color-coded graph, telling us how high the risk of a terror act was. Low-Green, Guarded-Blue, Elevated-Yellow, High-Orange and Severe-Red.
It worked at first, but people got numb to it being shoved in their faces for years. The lowest this scale ever recorded were a few weeks of Yellow, then back up.
Protests against the Iraq War heated up during this time. Mass arrests of protestors were made by local police operating for the Department of Homeland Security. This included the arrest of Revolutionist founder, Jacob Richards, and Red Pill cofounder, Connie Murillo, who were swept up in a mass arrest in New York City.
The system was thoroughly debunked. In 2011, they switched to a much more modest STAS system. It’s estimated that you are more likely to be struck by lightning three times than being taken hostage in a terrorist situation.
The Patriot Act is the fist, and Homeland Security is the spiked iron glove of American sleazy repression. Neither of them protects us.
Neither would be possible without the complete servitude of both major parties. On this one issue, there is a near complete support from the Democrats and Republicans.
After the Total Information Awareness system was deemed unconstitutional, the National Security Agency handed this off to PALANTIR, which effectively is a privatized spy agency. It monitors us to today, and has no pesky 4th amendment issues gathering and sharing your data with the feds.
DHS was caught using fake customs subpoenas to spy widely on people’s financial transactions.
Neither Homeland Security nor Transportation Safety Administration have prevented even one terrorist act. They have only arrested a few people who were just drug dealers, a job for the FBI.
In 2011, Democratic President Obama introduced the Indefinite Detention Act. Certain subjects, foreign and domestic citizens accused of terrorism, can be held in prison indefinitely with no charges fired.
In 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the controversial law. The single greatest threat to the Constitution was created by a Democrat.
The Revolutionist 