February 21, 2019
The news in the last two two days has been consumed with debunking Jussie Smollett’s account of being victimized by a racist, homophobic attack or anxiously reacting to the news that Mueller will be issuing his final report shortly. Our screens and feeds are full of smug right wingers reacting gleefully to each new revelation that seems to indicate that Smollett staged the attack himself, implying that this one anecdote debunks the reality of the increase in racist and homophobic attacks over the last three years. On the other side, serious journalists speculate on how much Mueller will reveal and to whom. They fret about whether a paucity of information will allow Trump to escape unscathed. Both sets of commentators, through willful or hopeful obfuscation, are misapprehending the very real danger that remains, regardless of the outcome of the Smollett story or the Special Counsel’s report.
The chilling facts behind yesterday’s arrest of Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Paul Hasson prove that point better than any ream of statistics ever could. Hasson was arrested with a cache of weapons and other supplies that he had been amassing for two years in preparation for a mass terror attack. His list of potential targets included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Hasson called for ‘focused violence’ to ‘establish a white homeland’.” The prosecutor’s filing dubbed him a “domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect governmental conduct,” (Source: “Coast Guard Lieutenant planned mass terror attack,” by Lynh Bui, The Washington Post, 2/20/19).
This should come as no surprise. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning of the rise of right wing domestic terrorism in the wake of the election of the first Black president. The report detailed how right wing terrorists were reacting violently to the increased racial and religious diversity in the United States and using issues like opposition to abortion and gun control to increase their ranks. DHS warned that domestic terrorists “would attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat,” (Source: “Right wing extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Assessment, 4/7/09).
When the report was leaked by conservative media at the time, it sparked an immediate backlash. Republicans climbed on their high horse and took offense on behalf of veterans. They “demanded that …DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind [the]report.” As a result of the fierce reaction that the leaked report received, the federal government disbanded the unit within DHS focused on domestic terror, (Source: “I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right,” by Daryl Johnson, The Washington Post, 8/21/17).
The absence of monitoring allowed right wing terrorism to steadily increase. Immediately upon taking office, Trump’s former Attorney General, committed racist and serial perjurer Jeff Sessions further empowered the forces of white supremacist terrorism, by narrowing the focus of the program on domestic terrorism to “Islamic terrorists,” a policy change driven by fear, not facts, (Source: “The Trump administration is showing white nationalists it won’t fight them at all,” by J.M. Berger, The Washington Post, 2/3/17). Trump’s viciously racist rhetoric further emboldened them, leading to an explosion of attacks from Charlottesville to the attempted pipe bombing of Trump critics, to the Tree of Life synagogue attack.
The stark reality is that Trump is nothing less than a stochastic terrorist, which is defined as one who “uses mass communication to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable,” (Source: “Trump’s Assassination Dog Whistle Was Even Scarier Than You Think,” by David S. Cohen, RollingStone.com, 8/9/16, (quoting stochasticterrorism.blogspot.com)). We don’t need Mueller’s final report to understand that Trump is an unapologetic white nationalist who will not hesitate to harness the hatred and violence of his most unhinged followers to escape accountability and remain in power. Every person who engages in legal sophistry to argue that he is somehow beyond the reach of the law, or amplifies his propaganda by hiring his former spokespeople, is aiding and abetting someone with the same vision for a “white homeland” as Christopher Hasson. We’d better make sure that they know, some sins can’t be whitewashed.