DACA wasn’t the biggest win for the swamp-left this week.
Blink and you’ll have missed it. In amongst the furore over immigration, news coverage of Hurricane fallout, and North Korea’s latest tub thumping, President Trump signed that anti-free speech resolution I warned about just a few days ago.
The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump has signed a resolution condemning white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups following a white-nationalist rally in Virginia that descended into deadly violence.
The resolution also urged Trump and his administration to speak out against hate groups that espouse racism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy.
That’s not entirely accurate. In fact it’s a pretty thoughtless and likely intentional misinterpretation of the breadth of this resolution and its real world implications.
As I’ve already pointed out, the resolution expresses “support for the Charlottesville community”, which is great, but then demands the President rejects “White nationalists, White supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups” and urges him and his cabinet to “use all available resources to address the threats posed by those groups”.
Were it simply this symbolic, I wouldn’t be banging on about it. Were epithets like “white nationalist” or “white supremacist” not used against people like me, and sites like Breitbart.com, it may be excusable — and mockable — as simple virtue signaling.
But it’s not just symbolic.
The resolution demands “the President and the President’s Cabinet… use all available resources to address the threats posed by those groups” and requires “the heads of other Federal agencies… improve the reporting of hate crimes and… emphasize the importance of the collection, and… reporting to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of hate crime data by State and local agencies”.
As egregious and disgusting as many of the groups mentioned are, this is still — last time I checked — the United States of America. The only country that has enshrined in law its commitment to defending people’s rights to say whatever they want, no matter how nasty, depraved, absurd, or “deplorable”.
It is also telling that after months of hurling these labels at people like you and I — and indeed at the President himself — the establishment is now demanding President Trump “use all available resources to address the threats”.
This isn’t just an attack on the KKK and fringe groups. It’s a veiled attack on anything the establishment considers to be a threat to its long-standing though swiftly diminishing hegemony over the political discourse in this country. If you’re on the political left — especially if you’re a Bernie supporter — don’t think they won’t try and apply this to you, too. This is real fascism.
As I said recently of the intentionally vague and sometimes meaningless terminology used in the resolution:
Today, a “racist” is someone who believes in legal immigration. An “extremist” is someone who doesn’t believe in mass, state-funded abortion. A “xenophobe” is someone who takes pride in their nation. An “anti-Semite” is — curiously — someone who supports the State of Israel, and “white supremacy” now occupies the Oval Office. The Overton window has shifted so far that even practicing Muslims are now decried by the most heavily quoted sources as “Islamophobes”.
Last night the President signed this.
While I have no truck with ethno-nationalists or the KKK, this is an obvious ruse — the first move in a long attempt to criminalise speech, or even thought, in the United States.
Ask yourself why when there are hurricanes, when there’s North Korea, when there’s international terrorism, when there’s the DACA debate, the President was being urged to sign this resolution right now.
Why the priority if its only symbolic? Why the loose language?
This is a heinous betrayal, and the fact no one seems to care about it is even more concerning.
Raheem Kassam is the Editor in Chief of Breitbart London and author of No Go Zones: How Shariah Law is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You√
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.