from the Congress Action newsletter

MOSAIC 2000

by: Kim Weissman
November 21, 1999


When Jesse Jackson formed his "Rainbow Coalition", the stated purpose of its political activism was to "encourage political inclusion" (his latest effort being the re-inclusion of a gang of rioting hooligans back into a public school in Illinois which, it will be noted, his children or grandchildren do not attend). "Inclusion" in this context means implementing the bumper-sticker ideology demanding that we "celebrate diversity".

Of course, the diversity we are ordered to celebrate is of a very limited variety: left-wing liberalism and socialism are about as diverse as it gets. If you have European ancestry, or are a republican, or a conservative, or hold devout religious beliefs, or if you believe in the limited government established by the nation’s founders, or if you believe that the Constitution actually means what it says, then you need to, in the 1960’s phrase, "get your mind right". This is especially true if you own a gun.

If you are one of those people who actually takes the Second Amendment seriously; if you believe that you have the right to defend yourself and your family, if the need arises, against rioting hooligans and the other assorted dregs of society championed by the criminals-need-understanding-and-not jail crowd; if you like to hunt or just like to target-shoot a firearm; if you believe that the government has no right and no business disarming you and taking away your property if you have committed no crime and pose no threat to anyone; then you are not part of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow. You are not part of that "beautiful mosaic of life" which the multiculturalists and the diversity gurus pretend to celebrate. You are not part of that mosaic, but your children may be attacked by one. It’s called Mosaic 2000.

What is Mosaic 2000?

One more project from the omni-present social engineers designed to make sure that your kids have their minds right, that they speak, write and behave in a proper government-approved manner, and that they think proper government-approved thoughts.

Mosaic 2000 is, according to the Assistant Director, Field Operations, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (the bunch which brought the nation the armored assault on men, women, and children in Waco as a means of enhancing their public image), "a computer-assisted diagnostic method for conducting high-stakes evaluations of persons who might act violently in school." Mosaic 2000 has been adopted from a computer profiling system designed to identify international terrorists, and is the result of a partnership between the ATF, an author and security expert, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. "As an evaluation method that is computer-assisted, Mosaic 2000 presents a series of questions which, after analysis and comparison, provides an evaluative report to the school administrator. In this way, it will help schools identify threats most in need of intervention, and assist school administrators in choosing the appropriate tools."

Mosaic 2000 is scheduled to be tested in pilot programs in about 20-25 schools across the nation, perhaps as soon as next month. What sort of factors will raise the red flags of Mosaic 2000 and help "identify threats most in need of intervention"? This is not yet clear, but perhaps we can gain some insight from the following list of "early warning signs", which come from a program called "A Guide to Safe Schools" developed jointly by the Education and Justice Departments:

  • Social withdrawal [Otherwise known as common and fairly normal teenage angst.]
  • Excessive feelings of isolation and being alone; Excessive feelings of rejection [Who defines "excessive"?]
  • Being a victim of violence [Blaming the victim? Doesn’t the left tell us that is forbidden?]
  • Feelings of being picked on and persecuted [Which includes any child with an older brother or sister.]
  • Low school interest and poor academic performance [A built-in excuse for incompetent teachers.]
  • Expression of violence in writings and drawings [Tomorrow’s Stephen King or Edgar Allen Poe had better plan on a new line of work. Diversity consultant, perhaps?]
  • Uncontrolled anger [Would that include our President’s recent temper tantrums when the Senate refused to ratify his nuclear test ban treaty? Uncontrolled anger is disturbing in a child with access to guns, it is even more unsettling in an adult with access to cruise missiles and nuclear weapons.]
  • Patterns of impulsive and chronic hitting, intimidating, and bullying behaviors [No doubt an exception will be made for those left-wing campus radicals who enforce political correctness through threats, intimidation, and the burning of campus newspapers which express opinions that they don’t like.]
  • Affiliation with gangs [Such as that gang of rioting hooligans in Illinois with whom Jesse Jackson is now affiliated?]
  • Intolerance for differences and prejudicial attitudes [Of course an exception will be made for every intolerant leftist who attacks anyone who is rich, successful, republican, conservative, religious, or who believes in limited government and the Constitution. It’s politically correct to be intolerant of them. But if you are conservative and have taught your child to be wary of environmental extremists, to believe that abortion is wrong, or that it’s wrong for a president to lie under oath and violate the Constitution, then your child is obviously dangerously intolerant.]
  • Drug use and alcohol use [Unless he didn’t inhale. In which case he might be elected president.]
  • Inappropriate access to, possession of, and use of firearms [To a teacher who hates guns, any guns in the home -- or even in a friend’s or a relative’s home – could easily be defined as "inappropriate". Very creative, isn’t it? Disarm law abiding Americans by threatening to brand their children as terrorists.]
  • Serious threats of violence [Which includes carrying a plastic water pistol, according to one school, a nail clipper according to another school, and merely writing scary stories according to numerous others.]

How will this system actually work in practice?

If you are a gun owner, your child already has one strike against him ("Inappropriate access to, possession of, and use of firearms"). And there’s another built-in strike against him if he’s conservative. Because anyone with conservative beliefs, or who doesn’t approve of "alternate lifestyles", or abortion on demand, or who believes that laws should be obeyed and that criminals should be punished, no matter what the skin color of the criminal, or who simply disagrees with leftist ideology, is automatically deemed to be intolerant by the left ("Intolerance for differences and prejudicial attitudes").

If your child is not a straight "A" student or doesn’t like school – which includes most kids – that’s strike three ("Low school interest and poor academic performance"). We already know that if he writes scary stories he could end up in jail for that alone ("Expression of violence in writings and drawings"). And anyone who has seen normal childhood playground behavior has witnessed a certain amount of rambunctious – and harmless – pushing and shoving among the boys ("Patterns of impulsive and chronic hitting, intimidating, and bullying behaviors").

There you have it: a normal boy, who doesn’t particularly like school, and whose parents are conservative or who own a gun. The profile is complete. A future child terrorist has been identified.

And what happens when Mosaic 2000 red flags are raised?

Will a parent even know that their child has been flagged, that a notation has been placed in his school file, that the police or the ATF may even have been notified? Perhaps the first inkling a parent will have is the visit from the State social worker "suggesting" a course of intensive child and family counseling, to help the child and family "grow" out of their dangerously intolerant conservatism. When a family moves or a teen applies to college and school transcripts are forwarded, will a Mosaic 2000 warning sticker be attached, cautioning all who see it to watch this kid, he could pose a threat?

As with all school psychological testing, the details will be kept confidential, and only the conclusion will be forwarded: watch out, this kid could be dangerous! How will administrators react to a kid who has been flagged by Mosaic 2000, but who has done absolutely nothing illegal?

But school violence is a serious matter, and we have to do something, don’t we?

There is nothing so terrible for a parent as the loss of their child, even more so if that loss might have been prevented. Thus anything goes, and so we see schools coming to resemble high security facilities – or prisons – with metal detectors at the doors, guards in the halls, and random searches of backpacks and lockers. Of course everyone wants safe schools for their children and their grandchildren, and since the high security atmosphere hasn’t helped, we will now institute psychological profiling by people who have little or no training in psychological evaluation.

There will be some reading this who believe that the scenarios painted above, of the abuse of Mosaic 2000 and the politicization of the results, are too extreme. But when have we known some on the left not to push their ideology to the extreme, not to politicize everything they touch, not to use public fear – whether legitimate or manufactured through demagoguery – to advance their agenda?

Look at some of the inflammatory and extreme rhetoric spewed forth in recent years by even the alleged moderates on the left. When republicans sought to make some minor adjustments in environmental regulations, no lesser light than the Vice President of the United States claimed that those changes would kill people. When republicans decided to devote more federal money to school lunch programs, but to move distribution of that money out of Washington and to the States, virtually every elected democrat claimed that the republicans were trying to starve children. When changes were proposed which would enhance the financial viability of the Medicare program, the official spokesman for the President of the United States claimed that the people proposing those changes really wanted old people to just die. A prominent democrat congressman, berating a duly appointed Independent Counsel, blatantly compared republicans to the Nazi party. And when the president was impeached, the Vice President went on a rant about how that president would be remembered as among the greatest in our nation’s history. There is nothing moderate about any of that.

And where is the American Civil Liberties Union in all of this? How different is Mosaic 2000 from racial profiling, which has drawn such hostility recently that New Jersey’s governor fired the head of her State Police over it? The ACLU has undertaken a major initiative to put an end to racial profiling, which includes launching it’s "Arrest the Racism" campaign, but seemingly has little to say about Mosaic 2000.

Could it be because those who will be naturally targeted by Mosaic 2000 – boys acting like boys, conservatives, gun owners – are those towards whom the ACLU has manifest hostility anyway? For all its high profile defense of even the most outlandish reading of the First Amendment, when was the last time the ACLU considered the Second Amendment to be a civil liberty worth defending? Never. Even in the First Amendment area, when campus leftists and socialists steal and burn conservative student newspapers, when has the ACLU leapt to the defense of the free speech rights of those conservative writers? Never.

The hysteria whipped up over a few high profile shootings, and the anti-gun fervor thereby generated, suits the left and this administration perfectly. One result is a major policy push allegedly to enhance school safety ("If Hillary is right that it takes a village to raise a child, it will take our whole national village to keep the nation's children safe in their schools." – Bill Clinton, August 17, 1999), and more particularly to further restrict lawful gun ownership. It is no secret that the complete abolition of legally owned firearms by private individuals (except criminals, of course, who get to keep theirs by a Justice Department which talks tough but is short on prosecution) is a cherished goal of the left and of this administration.

And when have we known this administration to practice moderation when they think they have the opportunity to advance their agenda? After all, one of the first major policy initiatives of this administration was Hillary’s dangerous scheme to seize control over one-seventh of the economy and impose socialized medicine on the nation, an idea so extreme that even the democrat-dominated congress refused to support it. However well intentioned Mosaic 2000 may be, the use to which it will be put by this administration is guaranteed to be political. And extreme.


The above article is the property of Kim Weissman, and is reprinted with his permission.
Contact him prior to reproducing.


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