Weapons of Mass Mendacity
President Biden says that white supremacy is the leading cause of domestic terrorism. FBI reports say otherwise.
President Biden asserted, in a speech at Howard University, that America is besieged by “white supremacy,” which constitutes “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.” The official text is here. This was retweeted by Nikole Hannah Jones of the New York Times and the 1619 Project, along with her claim that this supposed terrorist threat was “a documented fact,” though no documentation was offered.
https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1657482731939299332
Hannah Jones’ opinion is good evidence that the President’s beliefs are widely, indeed hegemonically, held, and also that they are false.
In the now-notorious weapons of mass destruction scandal of twenty years ago, the Bush administration claimed that Iraq had weapons it turned out not to have. It emerged that, though the intelligence community honestly believed that Iraq had chemical and possibly biological weapons, the evidence was being selected and manipulated so as to support the most alarming possible scenario. We now have an even more direct case of the manipulation, indeed the creation, of terrorism statistics to support another alarming conclusion. One difference is that while the Bush administration was focused upon a foreign enemy, the Biden administration is making things up to target its political opponents. Another is that Biden, unlike Bush, is ignoring information in his administration’s own reports. Unlike Nikole Hannah Jones, I have the documentation, and it is below.
As I wrote here, for all the shouting, there is little white supremacism or white racism in our society. The problem of domestic terrorism is similarly greatly exaggerated.
The excellent because knowledgeable Andrew McCarthy of National Review writes that the FBI is able to create numerous domestic terror investigations by describing the January 6 riot as terrorism. McCarthy, who makes no excuses for the riot, points out that, however deplorable, January 6 was far outside the normal meaning of terrorism, as it did little damage and involved no plans for violence of the kind associated with terrorism. The only person who died by violence that day was an unarmed demonstrator, Ashli Babbit, shot by a policeman.
Having declared January 6 a terrorist attack, McCarthy reports that the FBI then games the number of terrorism investigations by opening a separate case for every person investigated for January 6 offences, where the normal practice would be to open one case for the whole event. By opening separate cases across the country, one riot thereby becomes a nation full of domestic terrorists. The FBI’s report entitled Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism for 2022, uploaded below, counts 725 arrests from this one incident.1
This is hardly the first time that a government bureaucracy gamed its metrics in order to please its masters. And, to come back to President Biden, the Democrats are all too pleased to assert without evidence that January 6 demonstrators and other Trump supporters are also MAGA extremists, racists, and even, notoriously, semi-fascists. Definitional problems and flatly ridiculous assertions are given empirical camouflage by the FBI’s spurious metrics.
The same FBI report may be the source of the Biden’s contention about white supremacy and domestic terror.2 It contains introductory statements that support Biden’s contention that white supremacism is the leading domestic terrorist threat, while its more detailed information refutes that contention. Just as these are not the first manipulated metrics to grace an official document, this is not the first time that a state bureaucracy has told the politicians what they wanted to hear, before going on to cover the official posterior with more precise statements.
On page 6 of this report, we are told that white racism is considered the leading terrorist threat:
In 2020, the FBI and DHS assessed RMVEs, primarily those advocating the superiority of the white race, likely would continue to be the most lethal category of the DT threat to the Homeland.
[In Washington, as in Ottawa, serious penalties await those who speak without initialisms. For the rest of us, RMVEs are Racially Motivated Violent Extremists, and DT is Domestic Terrorism.]
This may be where Biden, or his briefers, stopped reading. The concluding sentence of the same paragraph concedes that, “In 2020, for the first time since 2011, no lethal attacks were committed by RMVEs who espouse a belief in the superiority of the white race,” which obviously calls the opening assessment into question.
The next paragraph moves onto 2021, the last year covered by this 2022 report, adding other groups to the “most lethal threat categories,” possibly by way of covering themselves against the possibility of another disappointing year. In 2021, there were two lethal attacks characterized as RMVE (i.e. racially motivated), though only one was by a white racist. The other is described as “one who allegedly used his interpretations of religious teachings to justify the murder of a police officer,” a wordy way of referring to Islamic rather than racial terror. In other words, in the two latest years covered by this FBI report, there was one — count it, one — occurrence of fatal white supremacist terror. It is a bit of a come-down from the President’s Howard University remarks.
President Biden, speaking from the world’s most famous bully pulpit, makes a sweeping assertion about white supremacy and domestic terror, an assertion which can look for the appearance of empirical support to prefatory remarks in the FBI’s annual report on such matters. But these remarks are themselves dependent on definitional games, and subsequently refuted by facts in the same document.
The facts, according to the FBI, are that there are very few incidents of domestic terrorism, and even fewer white racist attacks: none in 2020, and only one in 2021. President Biden and his party, with the aid of a press that has forgotten how to ask questions and apparently how to read documents, is creating a moral panic out of thin air. And these lies — weapons of mass mendacity, as it were — are being used not against a foreign dictator but to justify an FBI assault against domestic political opponents. This phony threat, and not the receding danger of white supremacism, is the real danger to America’s democracy.
ibid, p. 6-7.