Michelle Malkin in The Daily Wire:
No, no, no. Hell, no!
That’s my response [writes Malkin] to the latest trial balloon floated by the White House to join with Silicon Valley on a creepy program monitoring Americans’ “neurobehavioral signs” to (purportedly) prevent gun violence.
President Donald Trump’s old friend, former NBC head Bob Wright, has been pushing an Orwellian surveillance scheme called “Safe Home” — “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes” — that would cost taxpayers between $40 million and $60 million. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, reports that the plan could incorporate “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home,” as well as ” fMRIs, tractography and image analysis.”
It IS creepy. Unless you consider a totalitarian dictatorship wholesome.
Remember that government can justify ANYTHING by claiming to protect you from crime. Just because the government justifies something that way doesn’t make it right.
Governments — believe it or not — are made up of human beings. Human beings can rationalize. Rationalizing means “rigging the conclusion”. People with unlimited or unchecked power are the greatest rationalizers of all. Why? Because they face no accountability for their errors.
We’re talking about seizing the private records of “extreme” students. What does “extreme” mean anyway? Extreme refers to off the norm. You can be off the norm brilliant just as much as off the norm insane. Sometimes it’s even a matter of debate. So how are officials and school counselors supposed to apply the standard of “extreme” to sifting out future shooters? Are we to believe that anyone who is not — or who does not seem — AVERAGE is a potential suspect?
And then there are the techno companies like Google and Amazon getting involved. Good grief! This is another reason why we want these techno-giants to remain PRIVATE enterprises. The moment they start to partner with the government in proactively sifting out people considered dangerous to the republic is the moment we are using them as tools for dictatorship.
Who could be against looking at childrens’ mental health records if it will prevent a horrific shooting? Nobody. Who should be against the government peering into private records of children for its own subjective purposes? EVERYBODY. The method makes the poison.
If you hate President Trump, why would you want him looking into your child’s private mental health records? And even if you love President Trump, trust him and assume he has total control over what every single government official (in the Deep State) does … what happens when President Trump is no longer there? What then? Do you trust President Buttigieg or President Warren to have your civil liberties in mind when doing anything?
One faulty premise of such a proposed policy is that mental health records contain something more definitive than they really do. It’s assumed that a mental health record will tell you whether a person wants to shoot up a school, a movie theater, a shopping mall or wherever. “Gee, let’s get a hold of that record so we know who the next shooter will be”.
That’s absurd. The people most determined to do these atrocious things keep it a secret. Why do you think everyone is so shocked when it happens? The criminal mentalities — whether age 16 or 66 — who plot and execute such bloodbaths do not think they’re doing anything wrong. They virtually never seek psychological help. Why would they “confess” imagined wrongdoing to a mental health professional when they don’t even think it’s wrong?
I’m not saying it would never happen. I’m not saying it has never happened. I have been a mental health professional myself for 35 years, and I don’t once recall hearing or reading of it happening. But maybe it has, or maybe it will. It seems like an infinitely small possibility to prevent a bloodbath or shooting by peering into the mental health records of school children. You might even argue it’s impossible. Is that worth sacrificing even MORE of our individual rights and civil liberties than we already have?
I’m counting on President Trump to come to his senses on this one, as he usually does after floating a bad idea. Watch how Democrats respond to this idea. They will LOVE it. Why? Because they want control over our minds and psyches most of all. Once they have that, the dictatorship these sadistic narcissists so badly crave will be theirs.
And children are the easiest group to exploit.
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