For libertarians, it’s a basic law that group labels simply don’t do justice to the group the purport to brand. However, political profiling appears to be a growing trend among government bureaucrats since Mr. Obama took office.
The first recent example of profiling came in Missouri, when libertarians and constitutionalists were labeled in a government report as potentially violent militia members. As I reported last month, “the MIAC report highlights a growing and oft-overlooked phenomenon: government tracking and profiling of non-violent American citizens.”
A new report has been released, this time at the federal level. The Department of Homeland Security (which, in my estimation, never should have been created — the Department of Defense should take on the role of protecting Americans against attack) released a report indicating that there is a “fueling resurgence” of right-wing extremist groups that are seeking new recruits.
As an indicator of how silly the report is, DHS “has no specific information that domestic right-wing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” DHS spokeswoman Sara Kuban told Fox News.
This is just the latest example of why group labels fail. These two reports are attempting to label potential security threats, and in doing so have enraged an entire group of grassroots activists, talk-radio fans, and already-disenfranchised taxpayers.
Why is our government responsible for profiling American citizens, especially using a “group-based” model that fails to cite a single current example of what it is “reporting”?
If there was ever solid evidence that the Department of Homeland Security — a large bureaucracy that did not exist prior to 2003 — needs to be eliminated, this is it. Their report is a waste of paper.
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