Biden Domestic Terror Strategy Codifies Woke War on Wrongthink
The Biden administration's first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism codifies a federal War on Wrongthink. In sum, the document makes clear that the imposition of Wokeism constitutes a national security imperative.
That is, the strategy uses public safety to justify leftist domination of both public policy and the public discourse, enforcing the regime's ideology at the point of a government gun.
It comes against the backdrop of the Woking of the defense, national security and intelligence apparatuses, the executive branch more broadly and society itself, whereby those who run afoul of progressivism are deemed bigoted and dangerous—and therefore liable to be purged.
And it comes amidst an all-consuming effort to pursue anyone even remotely close to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, a catalyzing event for the strategy.
That effort appears to serve as the strategy's archetype, particularly given the cohort targeted, the lengths to which the feds will pursue it and the ways in which they are straining to make their case to justify the rhetoric of insurrection.
Defendants are languishing in jail for weeks while seemingly being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and those who get their day in court are recanting their political views forced confession-style—while innocent bystanders face ruin. This operation ought to demonstrate the hyper-political nature of the Biden administration's crafting and executing of this strategy, and therefore its immense danger.
The broader context cannot be ignored. But even within its own four corners, the strategy is full of disturbing passages, culminating in a positively chilling crescendo.
To begin, the strategy fails to clearly define who exactly it is targeting—meaning the target could be ever-moving, and forever growing—but strongly implies that the threat consists of at least the nearly half of the electorate that voted for President Donald Trump in 2020. It does so through invoking the Capitol Riot as typifying the domestic terror threat, warning of "narratives of fraud in the recent general election" that could spur forthcoming attacks and focusing on "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists" and "anti-government or anti-authority extremists"—the kind of "extremism" the Left cynically conflates with mainstream conservatism. This is demonstrated, for example, in the casting of President Trump, his supporters and their shared views as "white supremacist," the claim that the Capitol Riot Trump purportedly incited was rooted in "white supremacism" (as Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently declared) and in arguments that electoral integrity laws are tantamount to "Jim Crow" (as President Joe Biden has asserted, and which is now buttressed by his Justice Department's actions).
The logic is as simple as it is horrifying:
The strategy also never substantiates its claims that the violent extremists to whom it refers pose such a pervasive threat to the homeland as to demand the whole-of-government, if not whole-of-society, plan laid out. It expects us to rely on a politicized Biden administration-led intelligence assessment that downplays threats from the Left while providing little to justify its conclusions. Related dubious threat bulletins ought to only augment our skepticism.
The strategy treats January 6—in spite of the collapsing narrative that it represented a murderous, armed insurrection that threatened to topple the republic—as a domestic terror attack of paramount importance, while ignoring the death and destruction inflicted by the likes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) during last summer's 1619 Riots. Law enforcement, it is worth noting, has demonstrated an apparent double standard in its pursuit of those committing such acts.
The document goes so far as to reclassify the few attacks from the Left that it does cite so as to avoid the "racially motivated" label. Worse, the strategy completely disregards the threat of jihadists to the homeland. How could any serious, apolitical strategy on domestic terror ignore the Islamic supremacists who have killed more Americans than any other group over the last generation?
The strategy seems to acknowledge past failings to protect civil liberties in pursuing domestic threats, but then tells us that somehow, the very national security and intelligence apparatus hyper-politicized and weaponized at the highest levels over the last four-plus years will now "do better" by working with all relevant "stakeholders."
The strategy purports, in the words of a senior administration official, to "creat[e] contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence." While nations must of course be vigilant about legitimate national security threats, surveilling those near and dear to us based on vague notions of "radicalization" never defined is the stuff of third-world banana republics.
The strategy leaves the door open for the U.S. government to collude with foreign intelligence services in pursuing Americans.
The strategy speaks of the U.S. government partnering with Big Tech and other ostensibly private actors in pursuit of the threats it purports to identify. What could possibly go wrong?
The strategy also calls for authorities "to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories," which it suggests "can provide a gateway to terrorist violence." The strategy notes that "the Department of Homeland Security and others are either currently funding and implementing or planning evidence-based digital programming, including enhancing media literacy and critical thinking skills, as a mechanism for strengthening user resilience to disinformation and misinformation online for domestic audiences."
Where the strategy believes it derives this legal authority or social legitimacy is unclear. What is clear is that such a policy is incompatible with basic freedom and republican self-governance.
It is the document's close that reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that the strategy is about forcibly imposing the regime's ruling ideology.
In a section titled "Confront Long-Term Contributors to Domestic Terrorism," the strategy calls for combating domestic terrorism through anti-racism. "[T]ackling the threat posed by domestic terrorism over the long term," the document reads, "demands...prioritizing efforts to ensure that every component of the government has a role to play in rooting out racism and advancing equity."
Anti-racist "equity," which as the Left uses it is antithetical to real "equality," calls for overtly discriminating against individuals and removing justice's blindfold. The goal is to use policy to socially engineer the citizenry so that all outcomes are proportional to group identity. Applied Critical Race Theory, in other words, is now set to be our domestic counterterrorism strategy.
Meanwhile, as a corollary to the Biden administration mantra that everything is infrastructure, infrastructure would seem to constitute counterterror strategy. Citing financial relief measures contributing to "an equitable economic recovery that can counter the economic dislocation and even despair felt by many Americans," the strategy notes that "economic recovery and sustainable development" policies will be geared toward "alleviating over time the sentiments that some domestic terrorists deliberately use to recruit and mobilize." We need to implement progressive policies, in other words, to fight the material "root causes" of domestic terror.
Last but not least, the Biden regime calls for—what else—protecting and preserving its power and privilege. The strategy notes a broader priority: "enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms." To do so, it calls for "accelerating work to contend with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse" and, again, working to "counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories" that it claims lead to terrorist violence.
Controlling the narrative is now domestic counterterrorism strategy—as is ensuring that "the institutions" remain dominant, no matter how illegitimate and unrepresentative their actions may well be.
Any backlash cannot be tolerated and must be crushed—hence the rolling effort to destroy Trump, and now this effort to silence and chill tens of millions of his supporters by treating them as actual or would-be domestic terrorists.
The terrors this document could unleash may well prove far more profound and long-lasting than the ill-defined threats it purports to counter.
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