9/11/01: The day liberty died in America

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9/11 liberty tyranny

9/11/01: The day liberty died in America

On 9/11/01, Islamic terrorists launched an attack on liberty in America when they hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and a third into the Pentagon. The fourth jet — believed to be heading for the US Capital — crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers on the plane attempted to overpower the hijackers and regain control.

On 9/11/23, we recognize the 22nd anniversary of those tragic events: the thousands who died, the first responders who risked their lives to save others along with the many who died trying, and the heroism of the Flight 93 passengers on the fourth plane.

In the days following 9/11/01, Americans vowed to never forget that deadly day, and they committed themselves to do all they could to ensure that the terrorists wouldn’t win. Such sentiments were noble and inspiring at the time, but over the years they have proven to be little more than political rhetoric used by big-government Democrats AND Republicans to chip away at liberty and freedom in the name of safety and security.

In hindsight, liberty died on 9/11/01.

Almost immediately, government went to work creating a myriad of ways to destroy liberty. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The Patriot Act. The Patriot Act II. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying programs. Fake cell towers to tap your cell phone. All created to ensure a “safe” America.

Most of these liberty-killing actions were birthed under George W. Bush — proving that “compassionate conservative” was really code for “progressive” — and they were expanded under Barack Obama.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump picked up where Obama left off even though he claimed to have actually predicted the attacks.

Trump, who also delved into 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy theories, accused Bush of knowing the attacks were coming and also accused him of doing nothing to stop them. He also declared that the attacks wouldn’t have happened had he been president at the time and boasted about how he would have captured Osama Bin Laden before the 9/11/01 attacks occurred.

In a 2017 piece I wrote commemorating 9/11, I documented some of the ways Trump not only kept Bush’s and Obama’s liberty-killing policies in place, but he also added his own tyrannical touch with help from the Republican Party.

Shortly after Trump and the Republicans assumed full control of Washington in 2016, they created the US Cyber Command within the NSA — an idea originally proposed by Obama — giving the agency greater power to spy on Americans. And throughout his presidency, Trump and the Republican Party reauthorized FISA-702 numerous times; expanding the NSA’s ability to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on Americans.

Over the two-plus years of COVID Tyranny, Big Brother continued finding new-and-improved ways to kill liberty.

During Donald Trump’s reign, his son-in-law and advisor, Jared Kushner, introduced a Patriot Act for healthcare in order to form a new government/private sector partnership capable of creating a new “surveillance and data collection system” that could be used to track COVID Americans.

Apple and Google developed new hardware and software at the time that gave Kushner exactly what he wanted. The two tech giants claimed that their tracking system would completely protect privacy, but protecting privacy was never their prime directive. The whole point of creating a Patriot Act for healthcare was to make the names, phone numbers, and locations of people available to the government in real-time.

Some of Kushner’s objectives were realized with the development of COVID vaccine passports, and we later learned that they would serve as a model to replace the credit reporting system with a totalitarian “social credit system” like the one used in Communist China.

In November 2020, Trump’s Treasury Department introduced a plan to expand government’s power to spy on the international financial transactions of everyday Americans by “deputizing” banks to act on behalf of the government and gather private information on people without due process — an idea that gained new momentum under Joe Biden.

Last year, Joe Biden identified a new terrorist threat when he labeled Americans exercising their God-given constitutionally protected right to free speech as enemies of the state. For example, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined two years ago that people pushing “anti-government rhetoric” — including people standing in “opposition to COVID measures” — would be classified as “domestic terrorists.”

Biden lumped people exercising their free speech rights to disagree with COVID restrictions and Al-Qaeda into one all-encompassing category. In the eyes of Joe Biden, exercising your free speech right to protest masks and vaccine mandates and/or using social media to do so meant that you’re no different than the terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11/01.

Also last year, Joe Biden introduced a plan giving the IRS unlimited power to spy on our bank accounts using an often-overlooked provision in the PATRIOT Act that changed the 1970 Bank Secrecy Act. Under the change, new standards were established for banks to identify customers and maintain records, requiring them to report cash transactions over $10,000, resulting in numerous violations of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

However, government’s overall power to spy on our bank accounts was “limited” under the PATRIOT Act until Joe Biden expanded it with a Patriot Act for the IRS to make it easier for Big Brother to track every dollar made by every entrepreneur and small-business owner to ensure full compliance with tax laws, regardless of how little money they made.

With the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law last year, Joe Biden authorized an addition $80 billion to weaponize the IRS against every taxpayer by adding 87,000 new agents to the payroll, giving the IRS more employees than the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and the Border Patrol combined.

Biden claimed that this new IRS power only affected the rich, but it ultimately gave the agency financial data on nearly every law-abiding, tax-compliant entrepreneur and small-business owner because every bank and financial institution is required to participate.

In retrospect, the rationale used to justify the government’s liberty-killing response to the 9/11/01 terrorist attack led us to where we are today. Some may call that an unintended consequence. But then again, maybe it wasn’t unintended after all.

Liberty died on 9/11/01 . . . not at the hands of Islamic terrorists, but at the hands of our own government.

 

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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