We’re Being Branded the Enemy

A late 90s movie starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman seems to be moving from  fiction to reality before our very eyes. In the 1998 blockbuster Enemy of the State, Smith plays a lawyer caught-up in an increasingly intrusive government surveillance program led by the NSA. An innocent family man, he’s vigorously pursued by NSA operatives simply because he inadvertently crossed paths with a government agent.

Unfortunately for us, the prospect of widespread government spying against American citizens is no longer the stuff of tinsel town, but a cold, hard truth in twenty-first century America. To add insult to injury, however, a recently revealed Pentagon paper regarding domestic terrorism fingers mainstream Americans as potential insurrectionists.

Combine widespread NSA surveillance with a government definition of domestic terrorism suspects that amounts to political profiling, and the concept of constitutional freedoms seems to be fading fast.

Todd Starnes, host of Fox News and Commentary, recently revealed Department of Defense training materials that are labeling mainstream Americans as potential extremists and enemies of the state.

In a document obtained by Judicial Watch, a non-profit organization committed to government accountability, DoD students are told “that many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights and how to make the world a better place.”

WOW! This, effectively, sums up the worldview of millions of Americans who would consider themselves political moderates and conservatives. Based on the text of this one Defense Department document, more than half of the country finds itself on the receiving end of federal suspicion. These kinds of statements are pure political persecution, which have no place in an open and free society.

In case you were thinking that the above warning to DoD students could well describe America’s founding fathers, let me assure you that the Pentagon is aware of this implication. In fact, in the same document, they move from implying that the founders were extremists to outright stating it. The training manual reads

“In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

With those few sentences, a United States military training manual has stated that the nation’s founding was, in itself, an act of extremism. It’s almost as if the Obama Administration considers the overthrow of a tyrannical king an act of extremism and domestic terrorism.

This is a worrisome sign for freedom-loving Americans. The same far-left ideologues who claimed that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” when Bush was President now want to portray dissent as an act of treason.

Talk about a double standard!

The United States Congress ought to demand clarification from the Defense Department on the statements included in this training manual, and withhold funding for future HR training programs until this extreme set of statements is removed from the curriculum.

The Democratic Party may slanderously portray its political opposition as being made-up of “extremists” during election cycles, but for a federal agency, particularly the Pentagon, to portray political conservatives as extremists fundamentally changes the essence of America.

Dissent cannot just be considered patriotic when Republican presidents are in power, and no party should ever consider its power absolute. In America, the people lend power to the government, but our government is now attempting to reverse this essentially American notion and is granting itself powers the Constitution did not give it to possess.