When Did Policing Americans’ Thoughts Become Part of Homeland Security?
Now, DHS clearly thinks it is in the business of controlling domestic opinions . Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, calls the DHS grant program an example of “weaponized government” in service of the Biden administration’s “need to build a narrative that there are white supremacists everywhere … neo-Nazis everywhere.”
But this narrative is hard to sell when there are so few actual white supremacists. The last two “Nazis” highlighted by the media, one who opened fire on shoppers in a Texas mall and another who ran a truck into the White House fence, were a Latino and a South Asian , respectively.
Evidence be damned, the Left’s answer is just to keep talking about the right-wing monster and make it sound bigger and scarier. Take President Joe Biden’s recent speech at Howard University’s graduation ceremony. Instead of telling the audience of elite black graduates about the incredible opportunities that await them in the world’s most dynamic economy, in the world’s least racist nation, Biden chose yet again to talk about “crazed neo-Nazis with angry faces” and claim that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
Race-based extremism does exist in America, in (fortunately) rare and obscure varieties from William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries to Elijah Muhammad’s Supreme Wisdom. But any actual danger concerns a dispersed, fringe element in a country of 350 million.
In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League claimed that a total of 18 murders in the U.S. were “ committed in whole or part for ideological motives.” To put that in proportion, about 22,900 Americans were murdered in 2021. Of these, a disproportionate number of both victims and perpetrators are young, male residents of cities where prosecutors have decided to stop doing their jobs or legislators have defunded, demoralized, and intimidated their police forces into backing off from enforcing the law. The city of Philadelphia alone has seen 177 homicides since January.
While state and local governments face this real problem, the Department of Homeland Security has a slush fund of $40 million to spend on the vastly inflated threat of domestic terrorism. Apart from funding indoctrination seminars and policing speech, much of this money is going for purposes that are clearly local responsibilities.