by Max Morton at American Greatness
The Biden Administration recently released its National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. After reading the fact sheet, which was a bit disconcerting, I downloaded the full National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism document. By the time I finished reading, I was shocked. Evidently, President Biden thinks I am an anti-government domestic extremist. But that’s not all. Almost all of my friends and most of the people in the small Southern community where I live are anti-government domestic extremists, too.
So, let’s unpack this “anti-government domestic extremist” business. An integral part of the National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is an intelligence community assessment published in March. Having spent some time in the intelligence community, I was puzzled as to how agencies with the mission of foreign intelligence collection—and which are statutorily and explicitly restricted from conducting domestic intelligence operations—are now writing Intelligence Community Assessments on U.S. citizens residing on U.S. soil. Notwithstanding the troubling legal aspects, the assessment also lacked evidence to back up its broad assertions that America’s greatest threat comes from domestic extremists.
The strategy document claims to focus on unlawful violence from domestic extremists who pose a threat to public safety. The reality is there isn’t that much politically motivated domestic extremist violence happening in United States. Sure, there are countless FBI-manufactured plots and Homeland Security fever dreams of internet chatter to scare the public. But if one excludes Black Lives Matter and Antifa, actual political violence incidents, in a country of 330 million people, are a statistical anomaly. The extremely rare occurrences—the report mentions six over a 26-year period (including a Black Lives Matter activist misidentified as an anti-government extremist—does not make a domestic terrorism pandemic.
Since our national security warriors need a domestic enemy, they have decided to focus on noncriminal (or, at best, pre-criminal) thoughts and intentions of that enemy. In other words, the national security apparatus plans to decide who will commit violence in the future, and then act against those individuals or groups to “disrupt” their plans.
I’d feel a little better about this idea if this same national security apparatus had not failed to connect the dots on everything from the fall of the Soviet Union to 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the ISIS Pulse nightclub attack—while simultaneously entrapping mentally challenged homeless people into fake terrorism plots designed, funded, and led by FBI agents and informants.
Like a scene out of “Minority Report,” the new focus on thought crimes, and the use of private-sector contractors to monitor citizens’ political activities, seems less about countering the rare political violence in America than it is about suppressing dissent from the current administration’s political and cultural ideology.
As we discovered with the PATRIOT Act, abstract initiatives like this—with overly broad definitions and objectives—always mean more surveillance, more government intrusion into constitutionally protected activities, and more curtailment of civil liberties.