Posted on 11/14/2024 4:24:58 AM PST by george76
DHS was supposed to protect us from foreign terrorist attacks. Instead it has become an instrument of censorship and propaganda...
News broke Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump picked South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a key cabinet post for the incoming administration.
Conservatives are unhappy about the possibility — and rightly so. Noem is a terrible choice for any post in the Trump administration.
Trump won in part because he stood against the transgender agenda and pushed back against gender-confused boys competing in girls’ sports. Noem backed down from protecting girls in her state when the trans lobby came calling, then lied about it, then whined about conservative “cancel culture” when she was called out. She’s a coward and liar, and should be the last in line for a big cabinet post.
Noem was also one of the first governors in 2020 to accept Somali and other refugees without proper vetting, hardly a choice that recommends her to head up DHS. And, for what it’s worth, she awkwardly lied about having met North Korean dictator King Jong Un and about canceling a scheduled meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
All that said, the debate over whether Noem or someone else should run DHS is missing the forest for the trees. No one should run DHS because the entire department should be abolished. Trump rightly pledged to abolish the Department of Education in part because it’s been a failure. Well, not only has the Department of Homeland Security been a failure, it’s been worse than a failure. DHS was created after 9/11 for the explicit purpose of making Americans safe from foreign terrorist attacks, but it has turned out to be an instrument of domestic tyranny, a giant panopticon of surveillance trained on American citizens that serves no purpose except to censor, spy, and propagandize the very people it was meant to protect.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the wrong response to 9/11 was the creation of a vast surveillance and security apparatus, for the simple reason that it would eventually be turned on American citizens, as indeed it has been. All the technology, programs, and personnel dedicated to detecting and interdicting jihadist terror plots would instead go toward policing speech and surveilling law-abiding Americans.
Take for example the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA), which is housed within DHS and has been called the “nerve center” of government censorship — with good reason. It was originally created in 2007 during the second George W. Bush administration as the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), charged with reducing and eliminating threats to critical physical and cyber infrastructure. In 2018 under Trump, CISA was created as the successor agency to the NPPD, and its mission was expanded to assist other government agencies and private sector organizations in addressing cybersecurity threats.
It didn’t take long for CISA to start meddling in elections and suppressing free speech. In 2020, it was the foremost government agency attacking “disinformation” and “misinformation,” which turned out to mean anything the government happened to disagree with. The Twitter Files revealed just how extensive CISA and other federal agencies were involved in censorship efforts ahead of the 2020 election, deputizing Twitter and other social media platforms to police online speech in what amounted to a workaround of the First Amendment.
Here at the Federalist, we’ve reported extensively on how CISA has pressured Big Tech to censor Americans, worked with states to throttle election speech, and essentially served as the lynchpin of the censorship industrial complex over the past five years. It was at the heart of a federal censorship operation during the 2020 election cycle, together with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), that targeted our own Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis, colluding with Stanford University to pressure Big Tech firms to censor prominent conservative voices it deemed were spreading “disinformation.”
For the abuses of CISA alone, DHS deserves to die. But abolishing DHS wouldn’t mean that we would no longer have Border Patrol or ICE or Customs and Border Protection anymore. We had immigration and border security agencies before DHS (as part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service), and we could have them after it’s gone. Arguably, immigration and border security deserve their own department, whose head reports directly to the president. Protecting against foreign terrorist attacks can go back to being the job of the Pentagon.
It doesn’t matter what the agency or office’s name is, so long as it doesn’t have the power to surveil and censor Americans, meddle in our elections, and co-opt Big Tech into trampling the First Amendment. DHS has proven incapable of that, and it needs to be abolished.
Yes.
It didn’t work out.
Hear! Hear!
I totally agree that it should be abolished along with a bunch of other agencies.
But someone needs to manage the deconstruction...
move the offices to the south pole
make the offices 4x4 spaces with no windows, no electronics, no comms
No more DHS would be nice.
The sticking point is, who then would administer the Patriot Act...an actual Law passed by Congress.
It doesn’t go away, it just gets reassigned.
Remember: Trump isn’t even in office yet.
That may be the plan BTW...to abolish it. Which is why he picked someone like Noem (just to be a distraction until it’s gone).
I agree 100% this is a waste of government money. Cue in Pravda with sob stories of purple haired freaks that are now unemployed…
The big brother government just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
[Trump Shouldn’t Hire Kristi Noem, Or Anyone Else, To Run DHS. He Should Abolish It]
After experiencing the blatant idiocy of trying to get hired to a very low-level position, I agree.
A complete pain in the neck of incompetence and idiocy.
I’m a drug-free natural-born American citizen that worked for the USMCR and another federal agency and did consulting for another. They couldn’t get anything done for me. It was ridiculous. I told them to forget it.
Get rid of it.
Move the current employees to police departments and/or border patrol.
DHS is like a big, ferocious dog that turns on it’s master.
maybe her job is to turn the lights off
The so-called Patriot Act should have been called what it really is....the “Government Surveillance Act”.
If you don’t kill it, it will bite you in the end. The entire concept is antithetical to the American spirit.
DHS was put in motion after 911. The American people would have never agreed to this if there wasnt an event to move it forward. A reason to spy on the American public under the guise of terrorism
Maybe that’s Noem’s job — to dismantle the whole mess. She can be the proverbial hatchet man.
GWB messed up a lot in the wake of 9/11
Looked like he started out alright ... for a moment ...
Don't worry about the border, Tom Homman's got that.
Secret Service goes back to Treasury.
Let's see who Trump picks for Transportation - their job might be to assimilate what's left of TSA after Noem strips it down.
Coast Guard goes back to Defense Dept. (Hegseth).
The process might go something like that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.