On Thursday’s CNN This Morning, the panel reacted with alarm to reports that the Department of Homeland Security is compiling data on anti-ICE activists. Host Audie Cornish played a clip in which an ICE agent, in what she described as a “tossed off” remark, told a protester she was now considered a “domestic terrorist.” Cornish claimed that such language, once written into a report, “becomes a real problem for someone.”Republican panelist Kristen Soltis Anderson urged viewers to “think about what would have happened during the Tea Party era, when the shoe’s on the other foot, about how upset conservatives would have been at the idea of the government tracking their speech in any kind of way. And so I always just think it’s useful to imagine, like, what if the parties were flipped here? And I think a lot of conservatives would be in, would be unbelievably outraged, and rightly so, if a Democratic administration was trying to track them.”But conservatives don’t have to imagine such a scenario. They’ve already experienced it.In 2009, the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled Rightwing Extremism, sparking backlash from conservatives and veterans’ groups who argued it cast suspicion on broad swaths of right-leaning activists. During that same period, the IRS admitted to subjecting Tea Party-affiliated organizations to heightened scrutiny in reviewing applications for tax-exempt status — a move widely condemned on the right as government overreach targeting political speech.More recently, under the Biden administration, DHS homeland threat assessments described domestic violent extremism as the “most persistent and lethal threat” facing the country. While the language focused on violence, many conservatives argued it blurred lines between criminal actors and broader conservative movements.Then in 2023, an FBI Richmond field office memo referencing “radical-traditionalist Catholics” and potential extremist infiltration into certain Catholic communities ignited national controversy before being withdrawn. Critics saw it as yet another instance of federal authorities casting an overly broad net around constitutionally protected religious expression.When Soltis Anderson invites viewers to picture conservatives reacting to Democratic speech-tracking, she overlooks recent history. The “flipped parties” scenario isn’t theoretical. It already happened.Note: We’ll stop short of classifying Soltis Anderson as a tame “CNN Republican,” but, as we reported here, this isn’t the first time she’s taken a “pox on both their houses” approach.Here’s the transcript.
CNN This Morning2/19/266:23 am ETTOM HOMAN: We’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, assault. We’re going to make them famous. We’re going to put their face on TV. We’re going to let their employers, in their neighborhoods, in their schools, know who these people are.
AUDIE CORNISH: Border czar Tom Homan, not trying to hide it. DHS is building a database. And if you publicly criticize ICE, or try to track their movements, you could find yourself in that database. The New York Times reports that Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta have all received hundreds of administrative subpoenas, not judicial ones, administrative subpoenas from DHS demanding data and persona information about what they call anti-ICE accounts. Google, Meta and Reddit have already complied with some of those requests.
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/mark-finkelstein/2026/02/20/cnn-expert-conservatives-would-be-outraged-if-dems-tracked
