Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio for yielding.

Here we sit on the floor of the House of Representatives, and we are talking about allegedly crime. But we are not talking about, of the 17,000 homicides last year, the 800 homicides in Chicago, the 562 homicides in Philadelphia, the 89 homicides in Austin, Texas--blowing away the former record of 59 homicides. In the 12 major cities that broke their homicide records in 2021, all have Democratic mayors.

We are seeing it across the country. We are seeing the absolute destruction of law and order across the United States of America through the defunding of police, through the attack on police, as we sit here on National Police Week, undermining the ability to prosecute bad guys.

Nobody in this Chamber would say we shouldn't prosecute bad guys. As a former Federal prosecutor, sign me up. Let's prosecute bad guys. I am all for it.

But we understand what this is actually about. We understand what propping up a domestic terrorism unit in this FBI, in this administration's Federal Government, what it is all about because we saw it in naked display last fall.

We see, through all of the information we are getting from whistleblowers, we see it in the information that we are getting on tags targeting parents. We see it in the empowerment of the FBI to focus and target parents in collusion with the National Association of School Boards, in active coordination with the National Association of School Boards, we are seeing the targeting of parents.

And this isn't made up. Scott Smith is an actual father. He is an actual man in Loudoun County, Virginia, who had his face put up as the poster child for an extremist activity by the FBI to target parents in coordination with that National Association of School Boards.

If you go back and look at the video and you hear Scott Smith's wife crying that her husband was being targeted, her husband was being targeted in the school board meeting because he dared to question the school board when his daughter had been sexually assaulted in a bathroom at a school he pays taxes for her to attend.

And then this administration had the audacity to make him the poster child to target parents with the power of the FBI. We know this happened. We got the information from the school board association. We got the whistleblower's account of the tags being used by the FBI to do it.

So as my colleague from Florida pointed out about what this is really about, it is about empowerment of the Federal bureaucracy to target Americans. That is what it is about. It is questioning that you don't think right. It is the extension of thought crimes that is pervasive in this body that will allow the government to target us for what we believe, inherently undermining our fundamental rights as Americans to free speech, to freedom of association, to be able to engage, to be able to talk with each other without having our government target us.

If a bad actor carries out bad acts, prosecute him, prosecute her. But you have to do that with police that are funded. You have to do it with district attorneys who will prosecute the crimes. And you have to be honest about saying we need to target criminals for criminal acts and not thought crimes. This is nothing more than empowering the Federal Government to police thought and speech in the United States of America, and we should oppose it roundly.

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