[AP via St. Louis Post Dispatch] A draft report from the Department of Homeland Security, assessing the most dangerous terrorist threat facing the U.S. today, concludes that it isn’t Muslim radicals from foreign lands or the left-wing antifa crowd — it’s domestic right-wing radicalism driven by white supremacists. Anyone who is surprised by this should spend less time listening to Trumpist propaganda and more time reviewing America’s long history of racist terrorism.
There are indications the Trump administration might be trying to skew the message from this report for political purposes, as it has done before with all sorts of data. Politico obtained three drafts of the yet-unreleased report and found that the first draft described the threat of white-supremacist terrorism in more specific language than the two subsequent drafts, which downplayed the racist aspect and described the domestic terrorism threat in more generic terms.
In any case, all three drafts conclude that right-wing extremism is the greatest terrorism danger in America today. "Foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for Homeland attacks but probably will remain constrained in their ability to direct such plots over the next year," all three drafts conclude. Together, they warn that "violent extremists almost certainly will continue their efforts to exploit public fears associated with COVID-19 and social grievances driving lawful protests to incite violence, intimidate targets, and promote their violent extremist ideologies." |