The Anonymous
Bag On My Head
The administration seems more focused on exploiting the U.S. Capitol riot for political advantage than on actual terrorists, especially those funded by Iran. In the months since, it has been relentlessly inflated into an “insurrection” and, as Biden hyperbolically put it, “the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War.”
Indeed, many of the most egregious claims about it, such as the idea that some who attended came armed with zip-tie handcuffs to kidnap members of Congress or that rioters beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher, have been debunked as false rumors.
The only real mystery about that day remains why it is that the shooting of one of the demonstrators, a woman who was gunned down by a still-unnamed law-enforcement official, has been hushed up—something the media wouldn’t have tolerated if it had been a Black Lives Matter demonstrator who had been killed.
Despite dire predictions of more insurrections to come and fortification of the Capitol and the continued presence of more troops in Washington than were there during the actual insurrection of the Civil War, the white-supremacy terror threat has yet to materialize. Democrats’ efforts to label everyone who disagrees with the BLM movement as white supremacists have also undermined Biden’s warnings about terrorism.
Some of those who broke into the Capitol—most of whom appear to be guilty of trespassing, disorderly conduct and property damage—remain in jail. Some spent months in solitary confinement. We should expect more such draconian measures if we start fighting a domestic war on terrorism that doesn’t target actual terrorists.
Meanwhile, most of the rioters who attacked government buildings, and burned and looted businesses during last summer’s “most peaceful” demonstrations, were out of jail in a day at most.
Some were actually bailed out by a fund supported by Vice President Kamala Harris.
The effort to rewrite the history of the last year so as to depict the post-George Floyd unrest as being entirely peaceful while treating the Capitol riot as another Civil War is already underway with an assist from Biden. While all decent Americans share Biden’s disgust with racism and sadness about what happened to Floyd, the notion that ideas, even hateful ones, rather than actual threats are terrorism is not so much an alternate definition than it is a way of defining the term so as to render it meaningless.
Biden’s vague warnings and redefinition of terrorism, the notion of a domestic war on terror ought to scare everyone. That’s especially true for those who still care about civil liberties, though the number of those who can be so described has declined after the coronavirus pandemic proved that most Americans care more about perceived threats to their health than about their liberty.
Biden referenced 9/11 when he talked about white supremacy being terrorism, though he failed to note that America should have learned some lessons about employing government power since then. The Patriot Act, after which the current efforts to weaponize the law against extreme right-wingers is modeled, was effective in some respects but was also an example of overreach, doing as much to infringe upon our freedoms as it did to stop Al-Qaeda.
The motive for that legislation was preventing another 9/11. If the current effort’s goal is to stop another Capitol riot, then its impact on our freedom will be all out of proportion to any deterrent to future mobs who wish to barge into the halls of Congress.
But while Biden is mobilizing the country against an amorphous threat of white-supremacist terror, he isn’t being honest about equal vigilance against other very real threats.
What the president is selling us is the notion that the real threat to American security is a terrorist movement of such white supremacists waiting to strike.
That’s the conceit behind the Anti-Defamation League’s push, echoed by the Justice Department, to create new laws that would give legal authorities seeking to prosecute those who can be labeled as associated with a terrorist movement the same latitude that is given our security services to deal with foreign threats. The “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act” introduced by House DEMOCRATS would move in that direction.
The idea that this is the main threat to our security seems rooted primarily in politics more than anything else.
https://www.jns.org/opinion/whats-behind-bidens-white-supremacist-terror-warning/
