Joe Biden takes action to address new threat of domestic terrorism
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/536053-joe-biden-takes-action-to-address-new-threat-of-domestic-terrorism
In the week since he became president, Joe Biden has signed more than 30 executive orders designed to crush the coronavirus pandemic, ensure racial equity, start the process of increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, rejoin the global fight against climate change, halt construction of the wall on the Mexican border, and many other badly needed and long delayed actions to fuel the recovery from the “American carnage” visited upon us by the administration of Donald Trump.
One announcement that has received less attention is a critical first step to bolster our security from a growing and sophisticated menace. Biden has asked the director of national intelligence for a comprehensive threat assessment of domestic violent extremism. This will properly focus on the type of homegrown insurrectionists we saw invade the Capitol earlier this month. We have to learn more about the links between homegrown and foreign terrorism. In 2019, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Chris Wray informed Congress that American white supremacists are traveling overseas for training with foreign nationalist groups. The New York Times confirmed those activities in a report this week.
Violent extremism is not the war our parents fought. It is not even the “global war on terror” of more recent times. It is an international guerilla conflict with tentacles in the United States, accelerated by a collision of problems, including economic anxiety, the tribalization of communities, online platforms that sow division and stoke fear, news media fueled by algorithms of bias, even gerrymandering that fences in ideologies, and perhaps worst of all, a former president who did nothing to curb violent extremism but instead looked for ways to incite it.
Even the structure of this enemy is different. The German foreign ministry oversaw a report describing the emergence of “a leaderless transitional apocalyptically minded, violent far right extremist movement.” The key word here is “leaderless.” We could pinpoint the source of murderous disinformation in Nazi Germany since Joseph Goebbels had the title of reich minister of propaganda.
But who is Q of QAnon?