As part of the Biden administration’s plan to crack down on domestic extremism, the Pentagon intends to launch a pilot program to screen the social media content of members of the armed forces, with the goal of intercepting what it considers “extremist” material. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made it clear in early April he was taking immediate action to counter extremism in the military – and toward that end was establishing the Countering Extremism Working Group.
Abraham Hamilton III is general counsel and public policy analyst for American Family Association. During an appearance Wednesday on American Family Radio, he said the First Amendment still applies to military members.
“That’s why we have so much litigation when the military tries to crack down on the religious freedom of some of our military members; [and] the same is true concerning the freedom of speech,” the attorney explained. “And the military, the Pentagon in particular, is aware of this because they’re considering using a private company to do the monitoring as opposed to them doing the monitoring themselves.”
But according to Hamilton, it doesn’t matter if a third party is contracted to do the monitoring in order to circumvent First Amendment concerns.
“The current law would view the hired company as an instrument of government illegal searching and seizing,” he stated. “And so, this is literally the Biden administration using the government [and] turning it on military service members, to become the thought police. That’s literally what’s happening.”
A report on Monday by The Intercept suggests that the Department of Defense “hinted” at such a surveillance program in Lloyd’s April 9 press release, which stated that a working group will make recommendations on “incorporating machine learning and natural language processing into social media screening platforms.”
Also, according to an Intercept report last week, the Pentagon’s list of potential consultants to be employed as “extremism experts” includes such “anti-hate” groups as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as conservative groups like First Liberty Institute and the Middle East Media Research Institute.
While Hamilton concluded that even though the Biden administration is likely to have problems implementing the plan, “it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to implement it.”
Bob Maginnis, a senior fellow for national security at the Family Research Council, also expresses concerns about the plan. “It’s very disconcerting, but understandable if you appreciate where they’re coming from,” he tells One News Now. “They’re truly Marxists.”
But that makes him curious about the criteria that might be used for identifying so-called extremists. “What are the labels? Are they religious in theory? Are they political in theory … or ideological in theory? We don’t know,” he admits.
“What we can surmise, given what the Biden administration has already done, [is that] it could go off the rails very, very quickly about what quote would be [deemed] ‘extremism’ and ‘tolerable’ by the leftists in the Biden administration. So, this is really a serious issue.”
Editor’s Note: The American Family Association is the parent organization of the American Family News Network, which operates OneNewsNow.com.
Comments from Bob Maginnis were added after story was originally published.
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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.
The “Socialist Democrat Party State” political officers, Gestapo, Woke and Cancel Culture are just getting started. You will obey, be loyal and support the “Socialist Democrat Party State” or you will be classified as
“Enemies of the State”.
And now this Socialist Democrat Party wants to control the way and what you think.
If the brains of our military are to be shaped in the form of that of Commander-in-Chief Biden, not any of our privates will be safe. I’d rather face the enemies of the State than these Democrat political enemas of the state whose corrupted military will be instructed in the coming rebellion to shoot only defiant demonstrators not of the proper woke color.The Roman Empire ruled only so long as indigenous Romans controlled the military which enforced a true Pax Romana. When foreign trained and foreign cultured troops were enlisted to defend the country, treachery and anarchy began to rule. To a social manipulating Democrat, their version of PAX (Peace) is delivered as “POX Americana” involves opportunistic created pandemics and has nothing to do with peace.
Control thought, you control what a person is and can do.
The leftist radical element calling the shots in the Democrat Party want complete submission to their aberant political constructs. Some of this thinking has already infiltrated the military with the removal of high ranking officers from position for extremist thoughts in opposing the critical race theory. This means that one’s loyalty is no longer dependent on one’s feelings toward the country but to arbitrary artificial standards apart from love of one’s country or commitment to duty. Submit to the Democrat Party or be ostacized to oblivion is the new ‘patriotism’!
” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made it clear in early April he was taking immediate action to counter extremism in the military”. In other words, Austin is going after Conservatives in the military. A purge! A great way to weaken the military, as Conservatives are the only ones that believe in our Constitution.
Yea, you can BET, it won’t do JACK to those who are members or supporters of Antifa, BLM Or any of those leftwing radical groups.. NOR WILL it do a damn thing to the closet muslim terrorists in our midst.