Tag: Homeland Security

Thank Goodness Kristi Noem Thought to Ask the Question: We don’t have to take our shoes off at the airport anymore

Thank goodness Kristi Noem thought to ask the question, because many things in government are just like this.  Someone comes up with a stupid rule, and we end up following it for the rest of our lives without question, even though it was dumb to begin with.  And that was certainly the case when it came to the security measures that were implemented after 9/11.  Our FBI and CIA didn’t do a very good job in detecting a terrorist cell within the United States training to fly planes in Florida, but not caring to land them, and our security got caught napping, so those terrorists were able to get onto commercial planes and use them as weapons of war.  And the crises of that moment made people clamor for corrective action, which human beings most often overreact to.  And the Department of Homeland Security was created, giving us the TSA, and the dumb policy of removing shoes at the airport while going through security.  Now, over twenty years later, it hasn’t saved anyone anything, but it has certainly cost a lot of time and misery.  And until Kristi Noem was put in charge of Homeland Security and asked everyone working there why we were still taking off our shoes at security checks, nobody had an answer.  The only thing they could say was that we were doing it because we had always done it.  Never was the question asked whether we should be doing it at all.  Thankfully, Kristi Noem, due to the weak reaction to that question, changed the policy, and we no longer have to remove our shoes at airport security checkpoints.  It’s a significant step toward addressing many issues that amusement parks have already identified.  An overreaction to security to cover the impediment of actually doing the job the first time is a dumb idea, and it’s good to see that policy go.

It has been terrible to deal with the security procedures since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The entire creation of the unionized TSA has been a disaster, making traveling by plane a miserable experience.  I try not to do it unless I have to travel overseas, because essentially it takes all day to travel.  I never feel comfortable arriving at the airport less than two hours before a flight because many things can go wrong, especially at security.  Nobody is saying that we don’t want security on flights.  However, it’s the kind of overcompensation that we see with the TSA that’s the problem.  Private security would be much better than unionized labor, which often fails to perform effectively in any field.  There is plenty of technology these days that can detect bomb making equipment just through a quick scan.  We don’t need to take off half our clothes through the demeaning process of vulnerability in front of hundreds of other people.  This idea of stripping away your identity into a near locker room vulnerability is just dumb and lazy.  And it never made us a safer society.  It just made us feel that way.  If people just did their jobs the first time, many of the well-known terrorist attempts that we know of on airplanes wouldn’t have happened.  However, these days, the technology is so advanced and intrusive that there’s no need to take off all your clothes to board an airplane.  With domestic flights, and I fly out of Cincinnati, if the destination is east of the Mississippi River, it’s much better and faster to drive.  And because of that, think of how much money airlines lose because of the TSA rules.

People don’t talk about it as much as they should. Think how much money Homeland Security has cost airline companies by being such a pain in the neck that people don’t buy plane tickets.  It’s a massive opportunity cost.  Before the creation of Homeland Security and the introduction of the TSA’s overly restrictive rules, many airlines had significantly larger hubs.  Delta operated a central hub that served numerous destinations from Cincinnati well into the 1990s.  Because flying was easy and not so intrusive, people chose to do it.  Once they turned the experience into essentially a locker room at the YMCA, it has cost airlines a lot of money in lost opportunity cost.  Some of the low-cost carriers have found a way to adapt somewhat.  However, the experience of flying has deteriorated significantly.  If you want to dress up and go somewhere to show the best version of you to the world, you don’t fly in a plane.  Because it’s such a demeaning experience.  And for a long time, amusement parks were just as bad.  However, they have recently upgraded their scanners, and as a result, they wave everyone through much faster.  The scanners can practically see through your clothing, leaving nothing to the imagination.  But at least you don’t have to strip down almost naked to go through security.  We live in a society that needs to do things faster, not slower, or safer.  We need people to do their jobs better the first time, and everything would work so much better.  And to Kristi Noem’s point, nobody had even thought to ask the question, “Why are we doing this dumb thing?” all this time.  When the answer was, “because we have always done it.” 

The convenience of flying and getting somewhere far away quickly has become a ridiculous compromise of personal merit, and it never should have been.  The airport’s safety policies have ruined the experience of traveling with others because people often show up in their pajamas, knowing that their travel day is going to be intrusive and demeaning. When you pay that much money for something, it shouldn’t feel the way it does.  It should be fun and rewarding.  People should dress nicely when going to the airport.  By default, due to excessive regulations, airports have become unpleasant places with excessive security, ineffective communication systems, and dirty and uncomfortable seats.  And the staff treat the whole experience like you’re lucky to be there, rather than being grateful that you bought a ticket that funded all their jobs.  The concept of prioritizing safety over profits, when in reality it was always laziness that was the real problem, has made owning an airline too complicated and a draining experience for customers.  And if not for Homeland Security and the TSA specifically, we’d have many more consumer options in airports that are much better for us than what we currently have.  And most of the time, it always starts with asking the right questions from leadership. “Why are we doing this dumb thing?”  And when nobody can answer it, you eliminate the policy.  Thank goodness, because of Kristi Noem, we no longer have to take our shoes off at the airport.  And hopefully, we can roll back many other misguided ideas that were implemented in haste to make people feel safe, when the reality was far from the case.  In all things economic, whether it’s amusement parks or airports, faster is better, and more options are always preferred.  And we don’t want dumb, mindless rules to ruin economic activity that should bring us joy and opportunity.  Just because lazy security guards don’t take their jobs very seriously and have to be turned into a union-led monstrosity to give an illusion of effectiveness, the truth is very far from it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Kash Patel is the Only Way to Save the FBI: Power hungry, corrupt, and pretentious, government employees need checks on their authority

The FBI was a wasted effort for me a long time ago.  When it was announced that Kash Patel would be Trump’s nominee to direct it, I thought only he could do anything to save the institution from destruction.  After what they did to Trump and many of us over the last decade, there is no forgiving them for their government activism, and really, a terrible job done.  And it’s a problem that goes far beyond the FBI.  I know people who have been in the FBI, and their mentality is very similar to the kind of nonsense we saw with Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe when he was grilled in front of Congress recently over the terrible coverage of Trump during an assassination attempt.  To avoid criticism, he went on the attack and cited his coverage of 9/11 and tried to play the “Hammer Time” card, “can’t touch this” because I’m a patriot angle.  It was embarrassing, but it revealed the same kind of arrogance we saw from former FBI directors, such as James Comey.  When Trump fired Comey for many good reasons, I was part of a panel that CNN called to talk about it, and I remember the attitude of the time.  Here was Jim Comey, who had just let Hillary Clinton off criminal conviction for her abuse of a public office with her email scandal and destruction of evidence, who was spying on Trump’s campaign and going on a personal crusade to destroy General Flynn, because Trump’s people were new and didn’t know all the rules of conduct.  Comey inspired the FBI to go on a witch hunt against Trump that would go on for eight more years and personally attempt to destroy Trump in every way possible.  Comey led a coup against an American-picked president by a civilian government, and his attitude was just like Ronald Rowe’s.  I’m important.  I work for the government.  Don’t ever question me, or I will yell at you. 

Trump fired Comey for his actions against him and Flynn, and he put in a swamp creature to appease his critics, Christopher Wray, and the FBI only got worse.  Trump tried to play the game fairly, and the FBI, from top to bottom, had no intention of being fair back.  They had government power, and they were hell-bent to use it.  And if you questioned them, you might be next for harassment.  And that’s what the CNN producers told me after we shot a spot for Anderson Cooper in the parking lot after I said what I said on the air about Comey after the first year of Trump’s first term.  It was apparent to me what was going on.  This was an out-of-control FBI, and Trump had just fired Comey, and the question at the time was whether Trump could have, or should have done so, based on the evidence at that time.  I used my usual velvet hammer response to talk about essentially a problematic subject matter when they asked me on the air if Comey had lied about his activism against Trump.  I also said that Comey was more like the fiction writer Ian Flemming, the creator of James Bond.  There was more about Comey that was fiction than was factual.  And for that, the CNN people told me the FBI would target me for talking against them on national television.  Of course, I told them I didn’t care; there wasn’t much they could do to me that they hadn’t tried to do up to that point.  I didn’t arrive at my conclusions about Trump recently, but I had a lot of experience with the FBI leading up to that point, and I thought I was being very nice about it.  All things considered.

But since then, the FBI has led the efforts to destroy Trump and his members of the former White House, especially Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro.  All of them were good men, and as I told everyone several years ago, Trump would put them back into his second term in the White House.  Fewer good people pursue justice than Rudy Giuliani, who was personally ruined by the Joe Biden White House.  Rudy had the now-famous laptop from Hell that had all the dirt on the Biden crime family, and the FBI tried to cover up that evidence with personal destruction against the guy who had the evidence.  I have watched the FBI many times over the years destroy evidence to drive a political narrative, and I have next to no trust in any of them at this point.  I always think of the Christmas shooting in San Bernadino by a radical Islamic couple as one of the worst examples in American history of an FBI coverup.  Right after the killings, and the couple who performed the acts of terrorism had just been killed, the FBI let the media into the couple’s apartment under cover of “full disclosure” and protecting the 1st Amendment.  But in reality, it was the purposeful destruction of a crime scene by letting the press ultimately contaminate the scene so nobody would learn anything about the terrorists.  I would say most of what the FBI does wrong is purposeful, such as not asking the following next layer questions when the terrorists of 9/11 wanted to learn how to fly planes from a Florida instructor, not to land them.  When you try to pin them down with criticism, they get all emotional and try to play a patriot card, just like that loser Ronald Rowe did.  They try to intimidate away criticism so nobody dares to question their lofty power in Washington, D.C. 

Kash Patel, who had the highest security clearance in government and was a great guy under Trump’s first administration, wrote the excellent book Government Gangsters and was all over the movie Police State.  I think the FBI, in its current form, is more dangerous than open terrorist organizations.  We would be better off without the CIA and FBI most of the time because they have become so corrupt and power-hungry.  Just reviewing the FISA warrant process that they abused against Trump shows the playbook they’d use against any of us to harass us over political disagreements.  Then, when they raided Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to knock off President Trump before he ever had a chance to return to the White House under a legitimate election, give me a break.  The FBI should be dismantled.   The only way to save it, and I mean the only way, is to put someone like Kash Patel in charge of it.  And the people who caused all this trouble don’t get a vote.  We aren’t going to be pushed around by losers like the Secret Service Director or James Comey, who was far more interested in wine tasting than rule of law ethics.  Comey showed himself to be a protector of Democrat Beltway politics at the expense of justice.  And those who came before and after him were no better.  So there isn’t anything to preserve.  Anybody who wants to try to make the FBI work properly would do well to get behind Kash Patel and support him without radicalism.  And be happy that he’s not as evil as most government employees are, self-centered, and corrupt beyond recognition.  I was always right about them, even when CNN pressed me in front of many people.  And I said it as politely as possible, but it doesn’t change the fact that we have never been able to trust the FBI with the kind of power they have had.  And it’s time for them to pay for the abuse of that power so the country can survive. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Homeland Security Invades Butler County, Ohio: How federal government seeks to undermine local law enforcement for strategic growth of centralized authority

I’m going to cry foul on the raid by Homeland Security into my community where agents from them, and the IRS went door to door on charges of financial crimes and labor exploitation.  Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s loser of a Secretary of Homeland Security, looks to be making some election-year posturing, and it was his policies that brought in so many illegal aliens even to make such a raid possible.  The four homes in Liberty Township and other homes up the highway into Dayton are just the tip of the iceberg.  But who let the iceberg into the country?  It was Mayorkas and the lazy and inefficient Homeland Security people who have made America far more dangerous.  As is consistent with many federal agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, they are picking a white-collar crime to get some news splash to look like they are doing something.  Usually, with such theatrics, they have money on their mind as they are looking for Congress to renew their budgets, and dazzling headlines like this raid are their method.  But honestly, it’s too little too late.  Many of the illegals who are being “exploited” were allowed in by the policies of the Biden/Harris White House and the antics of Homeland Security.  From the way it looks, the entire raid from Homeland Security was a pure PR stunt, and they targeted a Dayton company, Fuyao Glass, which happens to be a Chinese outfit, so there is a lot wrong going on here.  However, the problems are mainly under the water, and what Homeland Security did with their exhibition of home-to-home raids, complete with search warrants, is an abuse of authority and a shell game of smoke and mirrors that cannot be tolerated.  Because they caused the problem in the first place, they used their power and authority to disrupt our community even more, using a show of useless force to establish that the federal government has power and that people should hide in their homes and yield to it.

I’ve never endorsed shows of force like this by federal authorities.  They are corrupt at best and detrimental at their core.  However, before my recent experience as the foreman of a grand jury in Butler County, Ohio, the same county where a lot of this Homeland Security business happened, I would have my opinions shaped by skepticism, but not experience.  Now, I have some knowledge, which I very much wanted as I have heard from many prosecutors, police officers, and persons of all kinds about evidence, crimes, and the day-to-day function of law enforcement.  Now, let’s get one thing straight: I love law enforcement, and I love law.  I love our state legislature.  I love our judges in Butler County.  And I think a lot of our Sheriff.  I love our prosecutor.  I love establishing a law-and-order society built on biblical context as a natural extension of our American Constitution and the state-revised code and criminal law that spawns directly from it.  So, I was happy to say yes to an opportunity to be a grand jury foreman.  For me, that’s like giving Ralphie, the kid from the Christmas Story movie his first Red Ryder BB gun.  I would express my time on the grand jury as one of the best things I have done this year because it satisfied an itch I have had for a lifetime.  I have seen all these cases and read all the indictments in the paper prior, and I want to know why and how cases get prosecuted and how the process works from the top down.  And when you are on the grand jury, you get to be the top cop of your community for your term.  And when you understand the 10th Amendment, that makes you the top cop in the land of the free, and I like that, to say it mildly. 

Yet I could walk any cop or prosecutor straight to the home of many drug sellers and abusers.  I could go around my community as a vigilante like Batman and uproot many sex trafficking cases and drug busts to fill many newspapers, so it is very frustrating to me to see all the cases that don’t get busted.  And it’s been a mystery to me.  I have speculated a lot about why things happen the way they do, but now that I have experience as the grand jury’s foreman, I understand very well what’s going on.  Even if the police themselves aren’t allowed to say it, and let me tell everyone, I will put this experience to good use for years.  To say it mildly. 

While I can’t talk about specific cases, I can talk about the generalities of the overall experience, and one question I have always had is, if we know there is a drug house selling lots of drugs and poisoning our community, why don’t we storm in and get all the punks and lock them up and throw away the key?  Well, based on many hours of testimony by police who do these kinds of things every day, a clear picture emerges that is part of a larger pattern of concealment for which they are powerless to do anything.  One such hypothetical is a drug enforcement group that knows a drug house is selling, and they are about to make their move for a bust.  They have spent months collecting evidence, getting their warrant, and are about to take action.  But then the Feds come in, such as the FBI, and they beat them to the punch.  In one scenario that I’m thinking of specifically, the Feds kicked in the door, and the local drug enforcement guys lost visibility on the occupants for over 30 minutes, plenty of time to flush all the drugs down the toilet and destroy a lot of evidence ahead of the official investigation.  The Fed then throws their investigation into perpetual bureaucratic hell; the local guys lose their evidence and can only arrest possession of little bits still in the pockets of the perpetrators.  The big picture is never dealt with because Federal investigations often destroy the strings linking them to prosecution, such as what that Homeland Security raid was.  And that’s essentially why prosecutions don’t go further to the drug cartels themselves, and our local agents can only get indictments on the pushers they catch on the street, isolating the big guys from the higher crimes.  The crimes are covered up by purposeful negligence and federal agents trumping local ones with jurisdiction infractions that keep the story of crime from ever being told.  And they count on little raids like this one in Butler County with Homeland Security to hide the significant crimes they are guilty of allowing to happen in the first place.  It’s the same kind of negligence that was seen with the Secret Service that allowed a sniper shooter onto a roof in Pennsylvania to kill President Trump.  It’s a game that federal agencies, very politically motivated, have been playing for a long time.  And it is they who cause most of our troubles.  And our local people in law enforcement are continuously being disrespected by this process.  And I know how and why it’s happening now more than ever because I have seen it up close.  And I’m not happy about it.  So yeah, I’m not keen on what Homeland Security did in my community with their exhibitions of force in raiding homes and taking evidence so that neighbors would see the federal government at work trying to clean up a mess they caused but seeking public adulation for crimes they allowed to happen in the first place, for purely political monstrosities of doom and malice designed to topple our nation from within for enemies both foreign and domestic.  And anything attached to Alejandro Mayorkas should be viewed as a threat to the American way of life, including going door to door to impose federal power on innocent people for a show of force meant to suppress freedom and prosperity among free people just minding their own business.  I would say, based on my experience, those illegal aliens were let into the country to create the opportunity to get a warrant so that the federal government could impose power over local authorities and attempt to diminish local law enforcement in a grab for power and stronger centralized power in government that has as its goal a much more sinister plot unfolding as we speak.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707