Of all the creepy things that totalitarian regimes do, perhaps none is more creepy than their habit of encouraging children to inform on their parents to the regime.
Parsons, besotted with the regime, is actually proud of his daughter’s initiative: “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”
But after the Jan. 6 Committee is shut down come the new year and new Congress, people like Parsons will probably still be able to look to the so-called Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
For it turns out that the ominously named bureaucracy has taken “1984” as training.
But its tasks of surveillance and suppression of opinions that dissent from the official narrative have been folded into the mandate of the DHS, a superfluous and increasingly malevolent agency that could have come straight out of the pages of Orwell.
What sorts of opinions are they censoring? Those regarding the CCP virus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, for example. But it’s also censoring opinions about the protest at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as opinions about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
Doubts about that election are accumulating like barnacles on a rusted hulk at anchor, but you aren’t supposed to notice.
Whatever our masters in Washington want us to believe and parrot, there the DHS broods like a malevolent hen over your computer screen and social media accounts.
The latest revelation is that they’ve gone full Orwell, encouraging children who discover “wrongspeak” to report their misbehaving relatives to various tribunals.
Talk about creepy.
Remember, the DHS was created to help prevent another 9/11.
It has mutated into yet another governmental agency devoted to enforcing conformity and obedience among Americans.
“Misinformation is a [sic] factually incorrect, but not on purpose. Disinformation is when someone lies on purpose, with a malevolent intent in advance. And malinformation is when someone’s opinion is factually accurate (or at least not provably wrong) but DHS determines the use of such facts to be misleading.”
The DHS is proposing to police it all.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online post notes, these distinctions are meant to give the impression to the outside world that the DHS proceeds deliberately and with restraint.
In practice, however, they fold “all their targets” into the category of “disinformation.”
The effect is to regard any dissenting opinion as a deliberate misrepresentation of the truth, punishable, in the first instance, by being banned from social media platforms.
Do you think that the 2020 election was problematic? Do you believe that Hunter Biden’s laptop is disturbing? You’re guilty of undermining “public trust” in government institutions and therefore must be denied access to Twitter, Facebook, and so forth.
The Foundation for Freedom Online has produced invaluable material on a major threat to U.S. freedom.
There’s more to come.
But what they’ve already reported shows that the “DHS’s new role, essentially, combines the foreign powers over speech and censorship granted to the CIA with the domestic reach of the FBI.”
Think about that.
For the first time in our history, we have the U.S. government deploying a sort of “domestic CIA” authorized to surveil and censor the “lawful speech of U.S. citizens, stopping them from talking freely about their own elections or criticizing their own democratic institutions.”
It’s time to turn Orwell into fiction again.
