U.S. Senator from Rhode Island Sheldon Whitehouse gets a call out in Lora Ries and GianCarlo Canaparo’s Heritage essay about a turn of the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats toward suppressing their domestic opposition:

Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Richard Durbin of Illinois described parents’ participation in school board meetings as violent, suggested that parents are domestic terrorists, and asked Olsen why his National Security Division isn’t investigating.

Those who’ve had an eye on such developments for a while might feel the tug of familiarity.  The same thing happened just before the Obama IRS began illegally targeting conservative groups in order to disrupt their political activism.  Whitehouse played a similar role then, too, making dark insinuations about his Tea Party opposition as cover for a government agency to abuse its power and become a fascist agent of political suppression.

This time, however, it’s not merely IRS agents slow-rolling the paperwork of activists opposed to their political party; it’s the Justice Department creating yet another unit tasked with investigating, probably framing, and prosecuting those who might be politically problematic:

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week titled “The Domestic Terrorism Threat One Year After Jan. 6,” Assistant Attorney General Matt Olsen, who oversees the Justice Department’s National Security Division, announced that he created the domestic terrorism unit in response to the elevated threat of violent domestic extremism.

Olsen said he is focused on the threat of Americans “motivated by racial or ethnic animus” and those who “hold anti-government or anti-authority views,” as if challenging the government or those in positions of authority was somehow a dangerous thing in and of itself.  In contrast, the assistant attorney general barely gave lip service to foreign terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

As Ries and Canaparo suggest, everybody knows that this is a partisan exercise.  The Biden administration won’t be investigating the anti-government rhetoric and violent attacks from Black Lives Matter and Antifa.  At its most innocent (which isn’t very innocent), the objective is to find (and set up) right-wing kooks for public displays that taint all conservatives and further the ludicrous, inverted talking point that voting for Democrats is a firewall against fascism.

More broadly, acting on this mandate, an increased Stasi force will use the power of government to collect intelligence on and otherwise disrupt grassroots groups and mainstream conservative organizations that become too successful for the rulers’ tastes.

This sort of thing once would have set off alarm signals for Americans across the political spectrum, but with progressives in control, half the country has decided that winning is more important than rights or integrity.

Featured image by Devin Kaselnak on Unsplash.