Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden: The founders of America’s police state

When I was doing some research for the next article in a series documenting the lack of discernable policy differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I came across a piece documenting the role they played — along with George W. Bush and Barack Obama before them — in building America’s police state.

Though not exclusive to Biden and Trump, I decided this piece was relevant enough to the 2024 election to refresh and repost it because America’s police state has been under construction ever since 9/11.

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George W. Bush. Barack Hussein Obama. Donald J. Trump. Joseph R. Biden. These are the names of the most recent occupants of the White House, and they are the names of the founders of the police state America currently finds herself living under.

George W. Bush got the ball rolling following the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the man who “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system” showed us that he was also was also willing to abandon the principles of liberty and freedom to allegedly save liberty and freedom.

Immediately following the events of that tragic day, Bush joined a bipartisan Congress to create a myriad of agencies and programs responsible for killing liberty. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The Patriot Act. The Patriot Act II. Warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (NSA) under the “President’s Surveillance Program.”

These are just a few of the ways George W. Bush helped build today’s police state — proving that “compassionate conservative” was really code for “passive progressive” — as he provided a foundation for Barack Obama to build upon.

During his presidency, we learned that Obama expanded warrantless NSA spying on the phones and computers of Americans — thank you, Edward Snowden — an expansion he defended because it was “transparent” and provided “security” without sacrificing “our freedom.”

Barack Obama’s expansion of NSA power came as no surprise to those paying attention. On July 2, 2008, then-candidate Obama made this promise during a Boulder, CO, campaign stop:

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” (Emphasis mine)

While these words were forgotten after he became president, Obama put some muscle behind this promise when he had his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) buy billions of rounds of ammunition — enough to empty five rounds into the body of every living American at the time.

Under Obama, we also witnessed the militarization of local police and a Department of Justice plan to put local police under the control of the federal government. We also learned that the NSA and local police were using fake cell phone towers to spy on Americans.

Just days after his inauguration, Donald Trump picked up where his predecessor left off with the federalization of local police when he threatened to “send in the Feds” if the City of Chicago failed to address its violence problem to his liking.

In October 2019, Trump made federalized police a reality when he spoke at the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Chicago. In his speech, he announced a new plan to begin a sweeping crackdown on crime using a program he referred to as “the surge.” Ron Paul called this plan “the Patriot Act on steroids.”

Though “the surge” was initially delayed, Trump used COVID hysteria, Black Lives Matter riots, and his collapsing reelection campaign in 2020 to refocus on his plan to create a tyrannical police state when his Department of Justice ordered the DHS to begin “the surge” in Portland, Oregon. Federal agents, dressed in fatigues and wearing no badges or Federal ID, abducted protesters, hauled them off to detention centers in unmarked vans, and conducted intelligence gathering as instructed by the DOJ.

This Gestapo-styled attack on liberty pleased Trump so much so that he threatened to send federal troops to “other cities to deal with unrest.” He later made good on this threat by sending federal troops to Chicago and Albuquerque. Tom Ridge, the first DHS Secretary under Bush, said at the time that Trump had turned the Department into “the president’s personal militia,” a sentiment also shared by Judge Andrew Napolitano, who called Trump’s police state actions “unconstitutional.”

During Trump’s presidency, the NSA continued spying at will and collecting massive amounts of call data on Americans. He was also instrumental in the expansion of FISA702, and he attempted to expand and make permanent the NSA’s spying programs.

This brings us to the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, who used America’s growing comfort with government tyranny to dismantle the Bill of Rights and build a police state.

Early in the first year of his presidency, Biden unveiled his National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism to counter the rise in so-called “domestic terrorism” — a phrase he uses to describe people critical of government tyranny. Biden added thousands of prosecutors and other law enforcement officials to the government payroll, including new personnel in the DOJ and DHS.

In August 2021, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terrorism threat advisory designed to silence the dissenting voices of people exercising their God-given, constitutionally protected right to free speech to protest government. The advisory identified “terrorists” as pushers of “anti-government rhetoric” who stood in “opposition to COVID measures.”

Joe Biden later leveraged COVID hysteria into an opportunity to address so-called misinformation concerning vaccines and mask mandates by turning Big Tech companies into defacto speech police — requiring them to surrender the user data to the federal government of people found to be spreading “misinformation.” Last year, Biden’s DHS also suggested creating an Orwellian Ministry of Truth known as the Misinformation/Disinformation Board.

In October 2021, Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) labeled parents concerned about Critical Race Theory being taught in public schools “domestic terrorists” when Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum about the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”

Joe Biden’s police state agenda also led to the creation last year of a “domestic terrorism” unit within the Department of Justice (DOJ) to deal specifically with domestic terrorism as defined by the administration.

Another target of Biden’s domestic terrorism agenda has been the Second Amendment. His administration has been stealthily building a national gun registry, and he has received commitments from credit card companies to help him build it by tracking the gun and ammunition purchases of their customers and making those records available to government.

This is just a snapshot of the myriad of ways George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama, Donald J. Trump, and Joseph R. Biden have been of one mind when it comes to build a police state capable of destroying liberty. The sooner we face this reality, the sooner we can get rid of the tyrannical Republican/Democrat duopoly and replace it with patriots who will work WITHIN the Constitution and not AROUND it . . .  and the sooner we can reclaim our Republic.

 

FOOTNOTE: I hope you’ll check out Part I, Part II, and Part III of the Biden/Trump series to discover how tyranny wins and liberty loses regardless of who wins in November. Part IV of the series will be posted later this week.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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