The real threat to US democracy

It's not the Republican party. The Democrats should look in a mirror

President Joe Biden delivers his “Soul of the Nation”speech

As Britain discovers from the reaction to the Queen’s death that (somewhat to its surprise) the essential sweetness of its society has not totally disappeared, the Biden administration appears to be plunging America ever more deeply into something very nasty and alarming indeed. 

The Washington Times reports:  

Rank-and-file FBI agents are accusing the Biden administration of exaggerating the threat of White supremacists and pressuring agents to cook up domestic terrorist cases involving racist extremists. 

Current and former FBI agents told the Washington Times that the perceived White supremacist threat is overblown by the administration. They said top bureau officials are pressuring FBI agents to create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as white supremacists to meet internal metrics.

“The demand for White supremacy” coming from FBI headquarters “vastly outstrips the supply of White supremacy,” said one agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have more people assigned to investigate White supremacists than we can actually find.”

Well, blow me down with a feather. The FBI has been repeatedly claiming that white supremacists pose as great a terrorist threat as terror groups abroad. While the threat from neo-Nazis and their ilk may well have risen in recent years, the claim sounds absurd. Around the world, the greatest terrorist threat by far still comes from Islamist terrorism.

The FBI’s claim is based in large measure on the fact that it is now investigating more neo-Nazi style terrorist threats than other kinds of terrorist threats. That doesn’t prove, though, that there are more of the former. It might merely mean the FBI have shifted their investigation priorities in accordance with the prevailing ideological dogma that only white people are bad/all white people are bad/no black or brown-skinned people can be bad because the latter are all victims of “western colonialism/imperialism/white supremacism” — a claim pushed relentlessly by hyper-partisan bodies such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Southern Poverty Law Centre.