Time: Inside The Biden Administration’s Battle Against “Far-Right Extremism”

America is barreling ahead toward its third populist moment.

There is nothing new about populism in American history. The country has been through the Jackson era and the Bryan era which respectively defined the second party system and the fourth party system. Occasionally, parties collapse, political coalitions breakdown, large groups of voters migrate between parties and new issues emerge that define American politics for generations.

It is a natural process and a recurring feature of the American political system. Trying to stop it and freeze the status quo in place to protect established elites is like proposing to outlaw the wind. Among other things that are driving the rise of populism, it was inevitable that radical and sweeping demographic change and the growth and intensification of political correctness was eventually going to make millions of White Americans deeply uncomfortable and unsettle our political system. Many people like Pat Buchanan saw it coming twenty or thirty years ago and were shouted down as “racists” for pointing it out.

The so-called “far right” is not in the driver’s seat. We’re only along for the ride and articulate these festering resentments online. Ordinary people and their experiences are driving the phenomenon. They experience the political correctness and wokeness on a daily basis now whenever they are exposed to the media. They increasingly experience anti-whiteness in the workplace. They probably experienced it in college. They are even forced to experience it in professional sports and video games now. The same is true of immigration. There has been so much legal and illegal immigration since the 1970s that more people than ever are exposed to it including places that were relatively isolated like the Upper Midwest. We’ve had such a long period of nearly complete free trade since the 1970s that it has completely changed the economy and physical landscape of America. It is not just Detroit that has been devastated. The same is true of small towns all over Appalachia, the Rust Belt and the Great Plains. Everyone sees the same reality even if they have different ways of understanding and explaining it. Some people can articulate what has happened to this country since around the 1970s better than most while others have their conspiracy theories. The proposition that the system is rigged to benefit wealthy and powerful elites and impoverish working people would command the assent of at least 70% of the American public.

Elites rule through consensus and America has been through a long period since World War II in which there was an elite consensus around liberalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism and antiracism. Those last three things were a new addition to our national identity in the mid-20th century United States and transformed the country in the tumults that we call the Civil Rights Movement and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, our elites began to layer on neoliberalism and political correctness, which similarly began to bear their poisonous fruit about twenty years later. In the post-Cold War era, we have broadcast this elite consensus around the “Free World,” so now everywhere across the empire it has entrenched itself it has created the same simmering problems.

The structure of our politics has also changed. There is a swelling oligarchy at the very top which has blown past Gilded Age levels of wealth. Below the oligarchs are the virtue signaling professional class which has dominated both parties and which shares the same modernist and cosmopolitan cultural views. Underneath the professional class are all these people with various resentments and grievances on both sides which are harnessed, exploited and manipulated by political professionals. The policy agenda of both parties is purchased by wealthy donors and the masses are distracted, riveted and entertained with endless rounds of meaningless political theater. Nothing ever really changes because that is the whole point. The status quo is working and is designed for the oligarchs who own and control the politicians.

As things go on like this for decades and modernist elites decouple from the hopelessly bigoted and uncouth masses, exclude them from politics and build a system that only works for people like themselves, the system quits working for the masses who gradually become disaffected. Resentment grows. The disconnect between established elites and the masses generates populism. Throw a major technological change like social media into the mix and suddenly the disaffected masses are talking to each other, sharing their own opinions, organizing to advance their own interests and not paying attention to the narrative on television which is being crafted by the political pros for the oligarchs.

This burgeoning new populist movement and its grievances which is a mortal threat to established elites is what the Biden administration calls the rise of “far-right extremism.”

Time:

“Just days after President Joe Biden was sworn in to office, his national-security team urgently reached out to the Anti-Defamation League for help.

The new Commander in Chief was launching a government-wide effort to combat far-right extremism and wanted to hear from the nonprofit, which for 108 years has tracked anti-Semitism, hate speech and domestic radicalism. “We expected to be contacted,” says Ryan Greer, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who studies extremism at the ADL. “We just didn’t expect it that quickly. The change in tone and urgency could not be more stark from prior years.”

In normal times, the top security aides in a new Administration would be focusing on dire foreign threats like transnational terrorism, Chinese cyberespionage or North Korean nuclear proliferation. This time, the gravest danger is closer to home. Spurred by the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, Biden has asked senior advisers to do something no previous Administration has attempted: refocus the network of U.S. security agencies to help combat domestic extremism. …

It’s a daunting task for Biden’s team: confront one of the greatest domestic threats since the Civil War without provoking a political crisis or infringing on Americans’ civil liberties. Officials are armed with little data, less money, few programs to build on and no proven solutions. Federal law enforcement is limited by freedom-of-speech protections for U.S. citizens. Local police departments are often ill-equipped or unwilling to determine whether perpetrators are part of a larger far-right organization. But Biden’s 100-day scramble to understand the scope of the problem suggests how far it has spread.

Perhaps most challenging of all is that fighting these extremist groups may strengthen them. Any crackdown on the far right risks reinforcing their narrative that the government is persecuting or silencing them for political reasons, which experts warn will further boost their numbers. Hours after Biden promised at his Inauguration to tackle “political extremism, white supremacy [and] domestic terrorism,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson warned his audience, “We are now in a new war on terror, but it’s a domestic war focused inward on the people of this country.” Pro-Trump forums lit up with furious messages. “If they start using bullsh-t legislation to target their political opposition,” one user wrote, “it should get violent.”

We’ve got a serious situation on our hands.

Trust in the corporate media has plummeted to an all time low!

92% of Trump voters think the corporate media is identical with the Democratic Party!

87% of Trump voters are sick and tired of being berated 24/7 on CNN and MSNBC by woke professionals for being White and accused of systematic racism!

64% of Trump voters now openly say their racial identity is important to them!

70% of Trump voters don’t even think Joe Biden was legitimately elected president!

40% of Trump voters are sympathetic to even using violence!

Some huge number of people have noticed that the DOJ, DHS, NSC, CIA and FBI have been weaponized by the Democrats to criminalize their domestic political opposition!

Millions of Americans have heard about the elite cabal which changed the election laws, censored the internet and orchestrated six months of violent protests in order to “fortify” the 2020 election!

Immigration is now the most polarizing issue in American politics!

Republican and Independent voters have completely turned against our efforts in Silicon Valley to censor the internet of all dissent from the narrative favored by established elites!

Americans now overwhelmingly say that the top priority of American foreign policy should be protecting the jobs of American workers!

The overwhelming majority of Republican and Democratic voters both say that free trade, policing the world and spreading democracy abroad actually isn’t that important!

We’ve banned the populist Right from social media and now they are all on Gab and Telegram where they are finding out about the Jews!

These people aren’t worried about “domestic terrorism.”

Over 100,000 Americans have died from COVID since Neoliberal Joe was sworn in as president. The current COVID death toll is 531,731. COVID is currently on track to kill as many Americans as the Spanish Flu which is the deadliest event in American history. What’s more, there isn’t an “insurgency” in this country and mass shootings fell off a cliff in 2020. This is extremely frightening to our political establishment. They were counting on a surge in “domestic terrorism.” They were counting on White Nationalists going out and brawling in street protests. Neither of these things has distressingly materialized.

In light of these gargantuan shifts in public opinion polls, why on earth would anyone go out and throw their lives away and engage in “domestic terrorism”? It makes much more sense to just engage in politics. After the George Floyd riots and Trump lost the 2020 election and wokeness went mainstream, the polls show that the normie is finally waking up like Rip van Winkle. It is clear that the extreme methods that these people recklessly used to get rid of Donald Trump have sown a far greater whirlwind.

What did “far right extremists” do to cause this? Nothing.

We didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Unlike Antifa and Black Lives Matter which engaged in six months of violent riots, we didn’t participate in any political protests in 2020. We didn’t go to Portland or Kenosha. We didn’t go to the “Stop the Steal” rallies or the Capitol Siege. In fact, we were less active and engaged in mainstream politics in 2020 than in previous years because everyone was severely impacted by COVID. It was the political, cultural and corporate establishment, NOT US, that did this.

They were the ones who redefined the meaning of the term racism itself to be mean systematic racism and blood guilt without giving any thought to the consequences. They were the ones who have opened the border without giving any thought to the consequences. They were the ones who censored the entire internet without thinking through the consequences. They were the ones who went wild on everything from Aunt Jemima to the Washington Redskins to George Washington monuments without considering the consequences. What are they going to do now? Are they going to start arresting random people like Gypsy Crusader for “extremism” without thinking about the consequences of their actions?

The ADL has radicalized millions of Americans by censoring Donald Trump and all of his supporters. What did they think would happen when they suppressed such an enormous swath of domestic political opinion? Did they think it would make those people want to watch Brian Stelter and read The Washington Post? Are those people going to become less sympathetic to “white supremacy” by demonizing them for being White and discriminating against them in the name of “equity”?

We should continue to just relax and do nothing because the ADL and the Biden administration will do more to drive the growth of “far-right extremism” than anything any of us could ever do with our tiny little platforms. Having Neoliberal Joe in there, pulling the woke technocrat trigger and antagonizing White people on the basis of their race and populist politics and taking draconian actions to fight “extremism” will make people more sympathetic to us. He hasn’t even done anything yet it is already evident that what happened last year backfired and moved millions of people toward us not away from us.

There is nothing “extreme” about our politics. The things we believe only look “extreme” to established elites and the professional classes who are upset that we reject their values and interests. If they try to wage a “war against domestic extremism” during the Biden administration, we will respond by waging a cultural, class and political war against them, not a “race war” which they are expecting, but a bottom vs. top war against wealthy, privileged and arrogant elites who have lost their legitimacy.