For a party that spent the entire four years of the Trump administration calling the president “another Hitler,” the Democrats sure are fond of gestapo tactics. Barack Obama, throughout his two misspent terms in the Oval Office, urged Americans to join his “Attack Watch,” later rechristened “Truth Team,” whose job was to rat out names of individuals who spread misinformation and “fake news.” And Joe Biden had scarcely taken the oath of office as president before he was talking about “partnering with private firms to monitor extremist chatter online” and launching “strike forces” to go into local communities to ferret out infidels who had not agreed to receive a COVID vaccination.
Now a new voice from the administration has chimed in. On Sunday, the FBI wrote:
Family members and peers are often best positioned to witness signs of mobilization to violence. Help prevent homegrown violent extremism. Visit https://t.co/bql36iSbig to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the #FBI. #NatSec pic.twitter.com/ZwJp5h5bWD
— FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2021
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Interestingly, the link within the tweet points to a government booklet issued in 2015 that pertains chiefly to threats from Islamist terrorist organizations such ISIS and al-Qaeda. That suggests that Biden himself likely had no hand in the tweet since his position these days is that white supremacists are the “most lethal threat” to the U.S.
But apart from that there have been questions in recent years about the FBI’s trustworthiness. Former acting DNI Richard Grenell wrote that the tweet “is outrageous” because the agency “has a growing credibility problem and this type of sinister snitching is clearly unhelpful.”
Other reactions were equally critical of the agency and the tweet:
