The Texas synagogue siege Saturday highlights the risk to Americans of the Biden administration’s singular obsession with targeting Trump supporters as domestic terrorists.
Thankfully, the FBI hostage rescue team did a stellar job rescuing the hostages, with the only fatality being the hostage-taker, a recently arrived Pakistani-born British Muslim demanding the release of a jailed anti-Semitic terrorist, dubbed “Lady al Qaeda.”
It is a shame that their great work was immediately overshadowed by the absurd, PC pronouncement of senior FBI officials and President Biden that no one knew the motive of the terrorist, Malik Faisal Akram.
But the attack is a reminder of times in the not-so-distant past, when Islamist terrorism was considered a threat greater than a MAGA supporter, and the national security apparatus was deployed to protect American citizens, not attack them.
Now the Biden administration has flipped it all around to target the Democratic Party’s political opponents, or anyone who displays anti-authority tendencies.
Biden last week called such Americans, even senators who oppose his party’s power grab on election laws, “domestic enemies,” and likened them to slave owners and segregationists. From his first day in office, he has labeled supporters of former President Donald Trump “white supremacists” and “domestic terrorists.” It appears to be his only animating ideology.
But now that he has tasked the FBI to chase down conservatives, it is not unreasonable to ask if the organization has taken its eye off the infiltration into the country of a terrorist like Akram. When the feds are busy rounding up MAGA grandmothers and Capitol paraders, are they paying attention to the potential terrorist magnet provided by the porous southern border?
We know that at least two Yemeni nationals on the FBI’s terrorism watch list were apprehended in separate incidents last year after illegally crossing from Mexico into California, and that Yuma Sector Chief Border Patrol Agent Chris Clem in December announced the apprehension of a “potential terrorist” from Saudi Arabia who had illegally crossed into Arizona. So the threat is still real.
As polls keep plummeting in this first anniversary week of Biden’s presidency, instead of easing voter fears about border security, inflation, COVID, crime, and even the basic competence of the administration, Democrats are strategically preoccupied with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
From the partisan congressional committee investigating Jan. 6 to the Department of Justice targeting parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” the narrative that conservatives are an existential threat is the Democrats’ only blueprint for success in 2022. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described Trump and GOP lawmakers as “enemies of the state.” The DOJ’s new domestic terrorism unit, which was revealed last week during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, targets people who are anti-authority.
To underline the unit’s purpose, specifically to target Republicans, the Democratic chairman of the committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, played video of the Jan. 6 riot at the beginning of proceedings while declaring the committee must “use this hearing to explicitly condemn the use or threat of violence to advance political goals.”
The government’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism unveiled last year is similarly tailored to Democratic preoccupations, peppered as it is with words such as “equity,” “racism” and “white nationalists.” It categorizes as domestic terrorists anyone who questions the 2020 election results or opposes COVID restrictions.
When Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled the strategy last year, he said it was precipitated by a “large and heinous attack … the January 6 assault on our nation’s Capitol … We have now … an enormous task ahead, to move forward as a country, to punish the perpetrators, [and] to do everything possible to prevent similar attacks.”
In other words, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is being used as a pretext to weaponize the national security apparatus against conservatives in what investigative journalist Julie Kelly describes as a new “domestic war on terror.”
This dangerously cynical strategy is the premise of Kelly’s powerful new book “January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”
She lays out the federal government’s extraordinary repression of American citizens, dozens of whom remain behind bars in DC without trial for Jan. 6 activity, despite not being charged with violent offenses.
In dozens of interviews with Jan. 6 prisoners and their families, she reports the pressure placed on them by judges and court-appointed lawyers to recant their support for Trump.
Their trials are scheduled for later this year, in the heat of the midterm elections.
Kelly has uncovered a “shocking dual system of justice based on political differences and a thirst for power.”
As an example of the dual system of justice, the DOJ has charged more than 725 people for their alleged roles in the Jan. 6 riot. But last week the DOJ said the FBI had arrested just 250 people for the seven months of BLM-Antifa riots that convulsed American cities in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
After a year of research, Kelly has concluded that as appalling as it was, the Capitol riot was neither an insurrection nor an armed insurrection. “Those who brought weapons … took steps ahead of time to make sure they would not violate D.C.’s strict gun control laws …
“Nor did the protesters intend or seek to overthrow the US government; to the contrary, Trump supporters later expressed sincere disappointment that the pockets of violence halted attempts to pursue an audit of the election.”
But “the ongoing investigation into the Capitol breach will continue to wreak revenge on Trump supporters [while] Pelosi’s January 6 select committee will create an ongoing political drama aimed at vilifying anyone in Trump’s orbit who can be tied to the purported ‘insurrection.’”
This is how the Democrats plan to win the midterms, by demonizing and intimidating their political opponents with government power while attempting to mess with voting rules.
The polls suggest their plan is falling flat.
