Tablet | The elevation of “domestic terror” to America’s No. 1 national security concern has less to do with social reality on the margins than it does with bureaucrats and experts at the center of American power. The latter are looking for a new enemy to justify the counterterrorism budgets that are endangered by the American drawdown from the Middle East, and their professional exigencies correspond with the Biden White House’s political program.
Hoffman told his Zoom audience about the Atomwaffen Division, defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “terroristic neo-Nazi organization.” I can find no evidence that Atomwaffen or any other neo-Nazi group was involved in the Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 6. After the Zoom meeting, I wrote Hoffman’s office to ask if they had found evidence I had missed. Neither he nor his office responded to questions from Tablet.
Hoffman noted that far-right ideologues preach “accelerationism,” a doctrine that urges its adherents to encourage and foment chaos to hasten the inevitable collapse of the existing system. But in less than a year, the political party that runs the system has pushed middle-class America to the brink of despair, with rising gas and food prices, ballooning inflation, open borders, a supply chain crisis, and experimental medical treatment mandates that have hollowed out heath care facilities and fire and police departments, and may impair the combat readiness of the U.S. armed forces.
Hoffman’s attempt to blame Trump supporters for the mess created by the country’s ruling class is an aspect of an information operation designed to deflect blame for elite decision-making onto a domestic opponent that does in fact seek to remove them from power by legal means: through the vote. And that’s partly what the effort to paint Trump supporters as domestic terrorists is about—to delegitimize the legitimate opposition in the in lead-up to the 2022 midterms.
“Domestic terror” is the establishment’s campaign platform. Sure, gas is almost $5 a gallon, heating oil prices are worse than in the 1970s, and grandma may need a fourth booster shot of a vaccine whose protective properties seem a lot less important to policymakers than the money that pharmaceutical companies—now the single biggest lobbying group in Washington—are receiving from the federal government. But what will your neighbors think if you vote for domestic terrorists? And why should domestic terrorists be permitted to incite domestic terror among their domestic terrorist base by advertising or posting on Facebook?
As with every information operation that political operatives, intelligence officials, and the media have run the last several years, the goal is not simply to smear opponents, but also to obtain from the federal government political and legal instruments to wield against them. The hysterical media coverage of Jan. 6 first gave rise to a congressional committee designed to target Jan. 6 protesters, and GOP officials, as domestic terrorists. The next step, it seems, is anti-domestic terror legislation.
Hoffman has explained in interviews since Jan. 6 why he backs domestic terror statutes: “It would require the federal government to gather data and statistical information on terrorist incidents in the United States,” he said in April. In other words, it would create work for contractors, consultants, and analysts who research terror-related issues, like … Bruce Hoffman.
Further, in an appeal to the progressive left, Hoffman contends that domestic terror laws would make America more just because they would “bring greater equity to sentencing.” What he means is that Muslim supporters of designated foreign terror groups already get long prison terms—so white people involved in “domestic terror,” however that’s defined, should also get long prison terms.
The reason there is no federal statute on the books for domestic terrorism is glaringly obvious: A politicized justice system would use it to attack its political adversaries, as the Biden administration is currently doing by defining the Jan. 6 riots as an “insurrection.” Insurrection sounds serious, it’s in the Constitution, so it’s used to frame Trump supporters, even though no one has been charged with it. The push behind a domestic terror statute is to turn the deplorables into untouchables.
Bruce Hoffman’s role in all this is to keep the Jewish community in line behind the party and Biden, who the majority of American Jews voted for in 2020. And they can help sell the operation, too, for few can speak more poignantly about the age-old dangers of white power violence than the Jews.
The terrible irony of course is that Hoffman is seeking to align the American Jewish community with spy services that are using a conspiracy theory to persecute their enemies on behalf of a ruling party increasingly comfortable with using state power and censorship to enforce its will. This runs counter to the country’s central principle—that citizens have rights that must be protected against the majority and the powerful. By desecrating civil rights, this new dispensation does not seem likely to create a polity in which Jews themselves would avoid persecution for very long.
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