John Fund is trying to revive the outrage that surrounded the 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremists. Remember, the right won that battle, probably to the detriment of the public’s safety. This time, the outrage is over a report produced at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. In the introduction of the report, they attempt to inoculate themselves against any Republican freakout:
It is important to note that this study concentrates on those individuals and groups who have actually perpetuated violence and is not a comprehensive analysis of the political causes with which some far-right extremists identify. While the ability to hold and appropriately articulate diverse political views is an American strength, extremists committing acts of violence in the name of those causes undermine the freedoms that they purport to espouse.
In other words, it’s a study of violent acts carried out by far right-wingers, and an attempt to understand the motivations behind the attacks. But it will be used to accuse the government of liberal bias and hostility to conservative political thought.
It should be good for a few weeks of Fox News programming. And it will feed into the paranoia that Obama’s federal government is coming for everyone’s guns. The last time we had federal gun laws debated in Washington, the result was a dramatic rise in far-right activity. The DHS and FBI need to be vigilant, but John Fund worries that they will take their eyeballs off of Muslim extremists if they keep a watch out for the next Sikh shooter or Timothy McVeigh. Fund needn’t worry. After the 2009 freakout, the author left is position at the DHS, and he now has this to say:
[Daryl] Johnson’s former unit has yet to recover from the onslaught. Before the conservative backlash, he managed a team of seven. Johnson says the agency “retaliated” against him by decimating his budget and staff. He and his colleagues were humiliated when agency chiefs conceded under oath that their report showed a lack of “concern for privacy, civil rights and civil liberties” of Americans. “They basically made life miserable for me,” says Johnson, who resigned in 2010.
“There are currently between one and two officers responsible for analyzing the threat of non-Islamic domestic extremism,” Johnson tells Media Matters. “Groups like the SPLC and the ADL have more people studying this threat than the entire federal government.”
I’m pretty sure there are people at the FBI and probably in Naval Intelligence who are looking at far-right domestic threats, but if the DHS only has one or two people working the issue, I am also pretty sure John Fund’s concern is misplaced and that he is totally full of shit.
