The War on Terror Came Home

Manufacturing a Right-Wing Boogeyman

Before switching parties during the second Obama term, there was a time when I actually liked Joe Biden. In a moment that defined his character to me, the then-Vice President in 2014 spoke at a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics forum. During that event, Biden made unusually and refreshingly frank remarks about U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, saying they had funneled money and weapons into Syria that ended up in the hands of jihadists. At the time, these off the cuff comments represented the most candid and honest take listeners would hear from the administration during the repugnant affair that would lead to mass anarchy via destabilization and the death of millions of Syrians. When Biden emerged victorious in 2020, after an unprecedented late-night resurgence, the word “gutted” accurately describes my feelings. In an attempt to cope, I tried to remind myself of the characteristics I once appreciated in Joe Biden. Partly aided by alcohol, I settled down days later to watch his inaugural address, trying to convince myself that everything would be okay.

That hope would be crushed within minutes of the divisive screed beginning, when it became clear that the war on terror was to be reframed. The focus was no longer groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS abroad, but on “domestic threats at home.” “And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat,” the still cognizant present President Joe Biden would proudly state. Anyone who had paid attention to left-wing rhetoric knew exactly what this spokesperson for a sinister directorate meant. For years, words like “right-wing extremist” or “white supremacist” had lost all meaning. What was once used to describe members of the KKK or National Socialist organizations would become attached to run-of-the-mill Republicans who dared to challenge the idea that America could absorb ever-increasing numbers of English-illiterate hordes from developing nations without negative consequences. The message Biden was stating was clear: anyone right of center would now be viewed as an extremist threat that required neutralization.

By the time June came around, the administration released the very first National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The statistically derisory groups of white supremacists and right-wing extremists would be identified as the nation’s top security threat. This carefully crafted theater was produced for two reasons. The first, from a rhetorical perspective, was to strengthen the unjustified claim that Donald Trump had significantly made the country more racist through his rhetoric. As we saw in the aftermath of Charlottesville, the actions of a few would be used to color the entirety of the Republican Party as Nazis. Secondly, the political establishment had discovered an extremely convenient and ill-defined phantom to present to the public to justify surveillance, censorship, and the prosecution of dissidents under the guise of national security. Essentially, this strategy offered all the authoritarian perks of the War on Terror at a fraction of the human and financial costs.

This domestic shift marked the first time in U.S. history that counterterrorism policy explicitly pivoted inward. Looking back at the time when expressing skepticism about things like the Patriot Act was enough to get labeled anti-troop or sympathetic to terrorists, the shift was always going to manifest, like Chekhov’s gun. With Washington’s security establishment declaring that the gravest threat comes from within, that inevitability had finally arrived.

The “war on terror,” long waged overseas, was officially redirected toward American citizens. In addition to the hyperbolic assessment of right-wing extremism being the biggest threat to America, the administration created a framework that mobilized nearly every arm of the federal government to address it. In addition to the FBI and DHS, the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, and even Veterans Affairs were tasked with tackling the root causes of “radicalization,” the oft-repeated and poorly defined term associated with not accepting a slew of globalist policies geared to destroy national sovereignty. These causes were defined in sweeping and poorly defined terms: racism, gun ownership, disinformation, and political polarization.

By reframing counterterrorism in a public-health-style model, the administration embedded domestic security policy into areas of everyday life: schools, healthcare, online speech, and community programs. Right-wing extremism had become the real-life version of Orwell’s wrongthink: a collection of beliefs that make a citizen more difficult to govern in an authoritarian society and needed to be suppressed.

Each madman who had a loose thread to something close to “right-wing” would be held up to the public as an example of where these beliefs led, and they would be used to smear anyone with an ideology loosely resembling them.

And, right on cue, groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) stepped forward to provide the raw material of agenda pushing: misleading statistics to be repeated endlessly throughout the various forms of media. Their recent reports claim that right-wing extremists have murdered “dozens” of people across 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The headlines, repeated without scrutiny, suggest some tidal wave of fascist bloodletting. But when that thin veneer is scratched at, the numbers look far less like a sober tally of political violence and far more like a carefully curated narrative.

Let’s start with the basic math. The ADL’s reports point to about fifty killings spread over four years, including the 21 deaths in 2022 they attribute to white-supremacist-linked incidents. In a nation where 20,000 people are murdered every single year, this is a statistical rounding error. For those unfamiliar with statistics, statistical power is the likelihood that a study will correctly detect a true effect, and larger sample sizes generally increase that power by reducing random error and improving the reliability of results. Grasping that one simple concept should cause any interpreter of data to be extremely cautious of the claims currently playing on loop in the West, yet the proudly well-educated patrons of modern propaganda seem completely unaware of this Statistics 101 lesson. When Asian hate crimes “surged” from 3 to 18 in New York City, a slew of articles emerged referring to an 833 percent spike without bothering to mention the raw numbers. When an opportunity is presented to insinuate that Donald Trump caused violence by correctly stating that a Chinese lab leak caused the COVID pandemic, statistical understanding is secondary to good rhetoric.

Likewise, the media eagerly inflates these rare and tragic cases into proof of an existential threat. Worse still, the ADL’s definition of an “extremist murder” is so elastic it could stretch across a Pravda newsroom. If someone has a passing connection to a right-wing ideology, like a tattoo, an online comment, or a vague past affiliation, their crime is bundled into the tally, whether the murder itself had any political motivation or not. The methodology is purely based on narrative-building, not any kind of objective analysis.

The problem is not just what the ADL includes, but what it leaves out. Based on the shockingly roomy definition of a right-wing extremist, one would assume that the same standards would apply to those on the left if they didn’t know what kind of depraved society they lived in. While the single death during Charlottesville is tossed out each time someone questions immigration rates, not a single one of the 25 people murdered during the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020 was killed by a left-wing extremist. Consider Darrell Brooks, who mowed down men, women, and children in Waukesha with an SUV after years of spewing leftist hatred online. Consider Frank James, the Brooklyn subway shooter, who posted lengthy rants drenched in racial animus and left-wing ideology. Neither case is considered “left-wing extremism,” and the media refused to mention their political history. The double standard is glaring: if a white supremacist commits a crime, it is proof of the existential threat of the Right. If a leftist commits mass murder, it is written off as mental illness, personal grievance, or simply ignored.

Historically, this bias is not confined to nonprofits like the ADL. It permeates federal law enforcement, likely through the same holes that information detrimental to right-leaning politicians leak out of. Under both Biden and the latter years of Trump’s first term, the FBI was caught inflating the number of “domestic extremism” cases by reclassifying ordinary incidents to pad statistics. Whistleblowers have testified that agents were pressured to find “white supremacist terrorism” even when the facts didn’t fit. Meanwhile, the Bureau dragged its feet when it came to properly labeling left-wing violence. The federal machine wasn’t interested in balance. It was interested in targets, and the target was anyone who could be branded “right-wing.”

The “why” here is the same as the question about why our government has traditionally been unbothered by mass immigration and declining native birth rates. Certain demographics are less tolerant of an authoritarian government than others, and there are a number of strategies and policies that are intended to reduce the numbers of people within that group.

By manufacturing a specter of right-wing violence, the political class creates justification for extraordinary measures. This includes new surveillance programs, expanded domestic terror units, partnerships with tech companies to monitor speech, and prosecutions that would never withstand scrutiny without the dense fog of fear. The War on Terror 2.0, while delayed, will be waged against anyone who dissents against the prevailing orthodoxy in our own backyards as soon as an opportunity permits.

The ADL and the time-honored media amplifiers are serving the state’s agenda every time they spread their spores of fabrication. Cherry-picked statistics, inflated headlines, and every omitted left-wing atrocity are designed to feed the same narrative: right-wing extremism is the greatest threat to American life.

While extremism sadly exists on both sides, it represents a woefully small fraction of the bloodshed in America. The insistence on painting it as a uniquely right-wing phenomenon has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with building a boogeyman large enough to scare the public into accepting what they’re told. After all, if you are skeptical of experimental vaccines, unprecedented demographic change, and a criminal justice system that allows career criminals the chance to continue hurting innocent people, you don’t want to sound like “one of them” and remain silent. Think about how our discourse usually goes when someone expresses an unpopular opinion, even when they provide ample evidence to support a claim. You will hear “That sounds like something the extremists would say…” or “Advocating for that puts you in the same camp as them.” The propaganda technique is poisoning the well through guilt by association with a boogeyman, shrinking the Overton window and narrowing the scope of acceptable debate. We’ve seen it deployed during McCarthyism, the Cold War “red scare,” the post-9/11 era, and in nearly every ongoing debate. The fear of association is enough to keep even the keenest modern minds mutely and impotently behind this wall of “acceptable” thinking.

A society marked by alienation, cultural fragmentation, and psychological fragility is especially vulnerable to propaganda that relies on guilt by association. As we’ve discussed time and time again, when people lack stable sources of meaning, or even a coherent sense of self, they become desperate for belonging and fearful of exclusion. The same disconnection that fuels the brand of senseless violence that has become uniquely associated with America also primes individuals to obey the boundaries of this intentionally narrowed Overton window.

If stepping outside accepted speech risks being branded as “one of them,” the boogeyman of the age, most people will retreat rather than risk isolation. In this way, propaganda exploits our deepest anxieties. It’s not just about politics, but about identity and survival in a society where reputational death can feel as catastrophic as physical death.

We’re told that 50 deaths across 5 years is evidence of a campaign of terror that merits unparalleled mitigations of rights and the weaponization of government agencies against the citizens allegedly in charge of this supposed Constitutional Republic. That very attempt, an attack on those who dare to think for themselves, is the true evidence of a fanatical political movement desperate to justify its own overreach. Americans live smeared, surveilled, and treated as suspects in their own country for what they believe, and the culprits wear the hat of the defenders of democracy while doling out lashings. While this war might be on hold at the moment, its commencement, a scorched-earth eradication, is a single and easily manipulated crisis away. Stand back, and stand by.

Epilogue:

We just witnessed the disgusting murder of Charlie Kirk. The tragedy merits its own article, but we can confidently say that whoever the cowardly killer turns out to be, one thing is certain: they will not be a left-wing fanatic. There will be no call for Democrat rhetoric to get toned down. There will be no congressional hearings about the dangers of MSNBC talking points. No editorials in the New York Times warning that progressive speech has gone too far. If the killer was inspired by leftist ideology, the story will simply dissolve into the background, treated as an isolated act rather than part of a broader climate of hostility. The double standard is so baked-in that it hardly needs to be proven anymore.