In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis published a report, meant for internal use only. The report argued that the future of terrorism threats against the United States would be in homegrown, domestic terrorism, spawned from the right fringes of the political spectrum; indeed, the 2008 election of America’s first non-white president, combined with the economic collapse of 2007 and 2008, had created fertile ground for hateful, right-wing extremism.
Republicans reacted angrily, demanding that secretary of homeland security Janet Napolitano rescind the report. Eventually, it was withdrawn, and by 2010, the DHS no longer had any intelligence analysts working in the field of domestic terrorism, as Daryl Johnson, the report’s primary author, detailed for the Washington Post in 2017.
Had the report not proved so prophetic about the rise of right-wing extremism in the US, it would have served as a useful example of what my colleague Matt Yglesias calls “the hack gap” — in which small issues, often related to the identity politics of older, white conservatives, quickly get blown up into national ones thanks to the right-wing media industrial complex.
But the report was ultimately prophetic. To read it today is to see officials sounding an alarm about a world where extremists illegally occupy federal land, or mail pipe bombs to Democratic party leaders, or commit mass shootings that target minority groups. It even seems to warn of the rise of a figure like Donald Trump, who might build speeches around a version of rhetorical extremism that’s been (just barely) gussied up for primetime, but who’s still perpetually courting that extremist base.
And yet members of the media — especially on television — are reluctant to call actions like mailing pipe bombs to Democrats or shooting up a synagogue “terrorism,” despite the fact that they are quite literally intended to terrorize certain populations.
vox.com
