The Department of Homeland Security has decided that the agency needs a new official seal. Where the ubiquitous American eagle faced the direction of the olive branches in its right talon, now the eagle will face the opposite direction — towards the arrows it clasps in its other talon.
“We’re actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because … when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we’re at war,” Secretary Markwayne Mullin ▶revealed in a Fox News interview this weekend. “Homeland Security is at war every single day against bad actors trying to hurt our backyards, and we’re not gonna allow that to happen.”
So in other words, the United States is at war here at home — but Iran somehow 𝕏isn’t a war. What?
In October 1945, seven weeks after the Japanese surrender in World War II, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9646, the first order in American history to define the great seal in legal language, with the eagle’s head codified as facing toward the olive branch. Truman said it was to reflect the new world of peace. Churchill quipped: “Why not put the eagle’s neck on a swivel so that it could turn to the right or left as the occasion presented itself?”
Nearly a century later, Churchill’s vision won out.
“ If you look at most of our seals throughout all the agencies, the eagle looks to the palm leaf because that’s in a time of peace,” Mullin said in the interview.
If anything, Mullin is underselling the significance. *All *federal agencies’ seals depict the peacetime eagle facing the palm leaf, not just “most.” And not only has Homeland never before depicted the wartime posture (not even after 9/11) — *no *U.S. agency has since World War II. Not even the “Department of War”!
There’s something very creepy about our government seeing America as a battlefield in ways it doesn’t even see overseas.
“The Department of Homeland Security seal was created in June 2003 and is symbolic of the Department’s mission — to prevent attacks and protect Americans — on the land, in the sea and in the air,” DHS officially says of the now obsolete eagle.* *The meaning was pretty straightforward: protect America from external threats.
Which raises the question of who, exactly, DHS believes itself to be at war with. Mullin’s public answer is the standard list — Islamic terrorists, cartels, weapons of mass destruction, etc. — but he keeps returning to the war being against Americans domestically.
“Free speech is something we all protect, but there’s a line that you can cross that goes from free speech to inciting dangerous behavior; and we have to attack that dangerous behavior at every turning point,” Mullin told Fox News.
This war against free speech is not just rhetoric. The federal government is increasingly monitoring what Americans say, particularly on social media, and it is increasingly building AI tools to monitor everything and flag what it considers threatening or offensive for further investigation.
FBI Deputy Director Christopher Raia recently revealed key details of the machinery behind this in a little-noticed ▶interview this weekend.
Of dangerous speech, he says: “Obviously, huge uptick the last year, 18 months, in political violence, political rhetoric, government violence, crime against the government — you name it, whether it’s FBI agents, ICE agents, congressmen on both sides of the aisle.”
The FBI is combatting this, Raia says, with National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which I’ve explained here.
NSPM-7, signed by Trump last September, directs the federal government to disrupt “organized political violence” — and lists, among the indicators that someone might be inclined toward it, “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” In other words, speech.
If you have any doubts about whether it’s really war, listen to Raia compare the methodology of NSPM-7 and its newly created “Joint Mission Center” to external (non) war:
“You’re familiar with the way that we worked the Iranian threat. We kinda did the same thing the way we worked the Iranian threat, and we applied it to this threat.”
Think about that for a sec. The bureau’s response to Iran’s domestic pot-stirring has entailed network mapping, informant recruitment, financial tracing, FISA collection, and pretextual interviews designed to rattle a target and see what falls out. It was built to counter the clandestine operations of a foreign adversary.
Now, this apparatus is being pointed at Americans.
And it has been staffed accordingly. Raia describes pulling personnel out of the divisions that normally have nothing to do with one another:
“There are pieces of this threat that encompasses our criminal division. There are pieces of this threat that encompasses the cyber division. There’s pieces that encompass CT [counterterrorism], even CI [counterintelligence], believe it or not. So we took bodies from all these different divisions. We put them under one roof, so to speak. … And then we’ve added, of course, our partners at HSI [homeland security investigations,
[which I detailed here]], Department of Treasury, IRS, and we have them all sitting in the same space.”
NSPM-7 directs the government to go after funders of Antifa, the left, and general protest on the part of the American people. This in practice means nonprofits and their donors.
Raia says that the Joint Mission Center is finding its footing:
“So we’ve seen that mature over the last seven or eight months that I’ve been here from a concept to really starting to hit their stride and really starting to attack these entities that wanna do violence against the government, wanna do violence to the politicians.”
The Center, Raia says, is ramping up its activity to investigate and bring criminal charges against those engaged in “cyberstalking” and “interstate” threats, known in the FBI as an “875” investigation because of a federal criminal statute that prohibits transmitting threats, extortion, or ransom demands. Applauding the willingness of U.S. Attorneys to bring charges against social media posters, Raia says, “I gotta give kudos where kudos is due,” remarking that it was impossible to get such a charge five years ago.
Here’s how Raia put it:
“Good luck trying to get an 875 charge from a US attorney, you know, five, 10 years ago. We're really getting a lot of support from our partners in DOJ and the US Attorney's Office in going after these folks. And whether it's a cyberstalking charge, whether it's 875 interstate threat charge — really getting a lot of buy-in from the US Attorney's Office and putting a lot of these folks behind bars.”
Anecdotally, I’ve heard of a lot of cases of people getting door-knocks for spicy social media posts.
None of them have been charged with anything. Yet. Now that the Eagle is armed though, the American symbol of freedom is getting its own thought-seeking missile. We all know who is standing downrange.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
