AG Bob Ferguson
Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson is urging the state legislature to adopt legislation establishing a commission on “domestic terrorism.” According to one report, this could lead to criminal charges against conservative individuals for expressing their views.
KTTH’s Jason Rantz described the legislation, HB 1333, as “the most dangerous” in Washington state history in his report Wednesday. He says Washington state is setting up a 1984-style Ministry of Truth.
As Gateway Pundit readers know, the Biden administration tried to create one at the federal level last year, backing off three weeks later after vociferous public criticism.
According to Center Square, HB 1333 would create a so-called Domestic Violent Extremism Commission (DVE) in the Attorney General’s Office. The commission’s 13 members will be asked to “recommend solutions to counter misinformation and disinformation, address early signs of radicalization and develop a public health-style response.”
Additionally, the commission in HB1333 is charged with finding ways to treat DVE as a public health issue, with only one member having to be a public health expert, according to Blaze.
The statute calls the Commission “the existing legal instruments, Both civil and criminaland making recommendations for potential new laws and regulations to address violent domestic extremism.
HB 1333 is the result of Ferguson’s 2022 “Domestic Terrorism” study. “Effective state intervention to address these threats has the potential to dictate speech or association protected by the First Amendment or the individual right to bear arms protected by the Second Amendment,” that study warned.
The study’s recommendations include creating a commission to explore data collection, but possibly adding a definition of DVE to the state’s statute.
AG Ferguson’s speech in explanation of DVE includes:
“Various forms of militant and political violence, such as intimidation, coercion, and intimidation, Misinformation onlineMilitant recruitment and government infiltration efforts, and A general spread of extreme white supremacy and anti-government ideologies.“
In a PBS interview in January, AG Ferguson claimed HB 1333 is needed because the federal definition of terrorism is “too narrow for the larger threats we see, for example, with the rise of radicalization.”
The basic idea, he explained, is to use “community intervention” to “take proactive steps to stop actual acts of domestic terrorism.” Such extremists may be forced to undergo consultation, for example.
Rantz explains in his report that the commission and the AG’s office are singularly focused on white conservatives and that HB 1333 was drafted by far-left groups.
The AG’s office makes it clear that they are primarily interested in targeting whites. In fact, his office rejected the term “domestic terrorist” because it was too “triggering” for minority communities. And it comes from the AG’s office report after it commissioned a group of stakeholders to explore violent domestic extremism.
The stakeholder group does not consist of a single conservative or moderate political group. Instead, it included advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on Islamic Relations, and the Planned Parenthood Alliance. Unsurprisingly, the group focused on white conservatives, whom they labeled as extremists, while systemic bigotry in police departments attracts extremists.
The group’s partisan, left-wing recommendations were used to craft HB 1333.
Groups and individuals who oppose critical race theory, mask and vaccine mandates, election fraud and grooming are what the commission and AG Ferguson called “anti-government” fascism and white supremacy. Indeed, Rantz notes during a recent House Committee presentation on Washington state “extremism,” a woman from the far-left Anti-Defamation League claimed without evidence that white supremacists have “common cause” with these groups and individuals. He absurdly claims that white nationalists use protests around these issues to recruit new members.
Although the legislation is clearly unconstitutional, Ferguson is sure hoping that the liberal Washington Supreme Court will somehow uphold HB 1333. The Left may control the Supreme Court by the time the bill comes before them.
God help us all if this happens.
