You are the bad guy

The Administration wants to cast American patriots as villains in a tired television narrative.

There is a moment in nearly all post-9/11 thrillers that anyone of a certain generation will be familiar with. It’s the point in the third act of a TV series like 24 or Homeland, or the last mission of video game franchises like Call of Duty, where the whole conspiracy has finally unraveled and the true villain is revealed. And he (it is always a he) turns out to be not an Arab jihadist, or a Russian ultranationalist, but a self-styled American patriot.

These reveals, intended to be shocking, always came off a bit contrived. For a population which experienced an unprecedented terrorist attack within recent memory, it was like living through a real-life version of The Exorcist, only to have the televisual tastemakers divulge that Linda Blair’s character was actually Old Man Withers all along.

One cannot help but get the same sense from the Biden Administration’s recently revealed National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. We have seen this one before and the whole thing comes off…a little formulaic.

Having waged two decades of unsuccessful war against global jihadists, and suffering through a summer in which black-masked anarchists orchestrated rioting, burning, and looting of urban neighborhoods in dozens of cities, the real enemies to domestic tranquility have finally been identified. And you knew basically without looking what the general plot of the Biden Strategy was going to be.

All those who oppose the present regime are racists, and by the transitive property, all racists are terrorists.

Casting Call

The Biden Strategy had already been widely foreshadowed by surrogates, including think tank types, journalists, and intelligence officials before its release, promising a massive, whole-of-government counterinsurgency effort. They used to compare it to Afghanistan, but now that the U.S. is pulling out of that effort in ignominious surrender, they’ve had to go all the way back to Reconstruction for a successful example of an insurgency they are prepared to defeat.

The “establishing shot” in the first paragraph lets the audience know what they are about to see unfold:

Domestic terrorism is not a new threat in the United States. It has, over centuries, taken many American lives and spilled much American blood—especially in communities deliberately and viciously targeted on the basis of hatred and bigotry. After the Civil War, for example, the Ku Klux Klan waged a campaign of terror to intimidate Black voters and their white supporters and deprive them of political power, killing and injuring untold numbers of Americans. The Klan and other white supremacists continued to terrorize Black Americans and other minorities in the decades that followed. In recent years, we have seen a resurgence of this and related threats (emphasis mine).

The authors proceeded to stretch the definition of “related threats” here well beyond suspension of disbelief to include the ongoing rash of street violence against Asian Americans and against Jews, violence committed overwhelmingly by black men.

Besides seeming to contradict their premise of virulent white supremacy, the inclusion of these other interracial hostilities is curious for another reason: such attacks, while heinous, do not meet any legal definition of terrorism.

Certainly, such incidents would fall under the rubric of “hate crimes,” whereby a perpetrator’s personal animus toward an actual or perceived identity of the victim is granted as warranting stricter punishment.

But these interracial incidents lack the use of intimidation or violence to achieve a political outcome upon which the definition of terrorism is dependent. This kind of bait-and-switch runs through the whole document, where the authors purport to be talking about terrorism but are actually seeking to make fundamental changes to address societal ills.

This slippage between political terrorism and hate crime is deliberate. Call it the disparity-impact theory of counterterrorism. Violence is terrorism whenever a minority community is targeted based on “hatred and bigotry.”

The strategy’s authors continue:

Domestic terrorist attacks in the United States also have been committed frequently by those opposing our government institutions. In 1995, in the largest single act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, an anti-government violent extremist detonated a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people—including 19 children—and injuring hundreds of others. In 2016, an anti-authority violent extremist ambushed, shot, and killed five police officers in Dallas. In 2017, a lone gunman wounded four people at a congressional baseball practice. And just months ago, on January 6, 2021, Americans witnessed an unprecedented attack against a core institution of our democracy: the U.S. Congress.

But if villains of the anti-government militia type are so prevalent over at central casting, how come the Biden Administration feels obliged to pad its account of domestic threats with a Dallas Black Lives Matter supporter or a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer and SPLC enthusiast?

And how “anti-authority” were those terrorists actually? The BLM political cause has been the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. corporate donations, and its political symbols are hung from U.S. embassies, while the attempted assassinationsof Republican congressmembers were carried out in defense of Obamacare, the Democrat Party’s flagship political achievement.

Perhaps it is because Republican congressmen are not a community targeted for “hatred and bigotry” that the FBI originally considered that attack a “suicide by cop,” even though political assassination is explicitly defined as terrorism under federal law.

Will the Biden Administration find it difficult to insist that the “most persistent and lethal” terrorist threats are militia extremists and “those who promote the superiority of the white race” when the best examples they can come up with are a heinous attack from nearly three decades ago and two terrorist attacks on behalf of causes with which the administration is politically aligned?

Not at all. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

All it takes is transforming a riotous election integrity protest, where the most common criminal charge amounts to little more than trespassing, into a full-on “insurrection.” The FBI and DOJ have been hard at work laying down the narrative that January 6 was an attack conducted by militia members and white supremacists. Courts are demanding defendants admit their wrong-think, confess their white privilege, and apologize for having ever questioned the legitimacy of the regime in the first place.

Questioning the regime is racism, racism is terrorism, and terrorism is a national security threat justifying a whole-of-government effort of counterinsurgency.

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