If the current domestic threat matrix was dominated by the prospect of right-of-center terrorism, we’d never hear the end of it.
The Washington Post’s comically vague dispatch on the thwarted terrorist plot targeting Donald Trump’s UFC event on the White House lawn on Sunday is something to behold.
The outlet’s dispatch quotes FBI Director Kash Patel revealing the arrest of “multiple individuals” who were planning a “potential threat” to the White House, but who were “stopped cold.” Readers were thus informed that the event was designed to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday and that it was overseen by the president’s “close friend,” UFC CEO Dana White. And that was it.
You could be forgiven for concluding that the potentially epochal mass casualty event that the FBI reportedly thwarted wasn’t an especially big deal. Maybe that was the Post’s intention.
Fortunately, Fox News provided additional details.
At least 23 people were allegedly captured in an encrypted Signal chat plotting to execute a sophisticated, multistage attack on Washington, D.C. — a plot advanced enough that some suspects traveled to nearby Virginia late last week to make final preparations.
The plan reportedly involved the use of “explosive-laden” drones that would strike buildings in the vicinity of the White House during the UFC fight, sparking a mass evacuation. Amid the chaos, a sniper team would open fire on the fleeing crowd of high-profile attendees. A “second stage” would then unfold, in which assailants would storm the White House — presumably in pursuit of as many administration officials as they could reach.
The motives of the would-be attackers have not yet been firmly established. But one of the five plotters whom the FBI arrested provided some clues: “A suspect told investigators the goal of the attack was to target ‘capitalist elites,’ ‘billionaires,’ and politicians who received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),” read the New York Post’s summary of Fox’s reporting.
The contours of this attack are familiar. They are evocative of a thwarted attack scheduled to unfold on New Year’s Eve, in which a self-styled “liberation front” planned to attack multiple locations in Los Angeles with explosive devices. The plan reached the point of maturity in which attackers were testing their improvised bombs when the terror cell was broken up by the FBI. That organization’s motives were also as plain as day: “Freeing the world from American imperialism is the only way to a safe and peaceful future,” one of the group’s missives reads.
Neither of these aspiring terrorist operations was as successful as the cell that pulled off a sophisticated ambush of ICE agents in Alvarado, Texas, last year.
On July 4, federal agents were compelled to rush into the parking lot outside the ICE facility when ten people in “black, military-style clothing began shooting fireworks at the facility.” As the agents investigated the scene, their attackers opened up on them with firearms using overlapping fields of fire. One officer was shot in the neck as dozens of rounds were fired in their direction.
Once again, the attackers left no ambiguity about their motives. ICE agents said that, in the attack’s aftermath, they found vehicles graffitied with phrases like “ICE pig” and “traitor.” In addition, their assailants left propagandistic literature behind them, including fliers that read “Fight ICE Terror with Class War” and “Free All Political Prisoners,” and a flag that read “Resist Fascism. Fight Oligarchy.”
As I wrote in my new book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, we’re living through a new wave of politically motivated leftist violence that is eerily similar to previous waves. One of the more unnerving parallels has been the revitalization of small-cell terrorist organizations that, much like the anarchists of the 1910s and the Marxist guerrilla movements of the 1960s and ’70s, set out to murder law enforcement.
We know with certainty (because we all lived through it) that if the current domestic threat matrix was dominated by the prospect of right-of-center terrorism, we’d never hear the end of it. Nor should we! The national conversation would be consumed by the threat posed by fascistic terrorist enterprises. The media landscape would obsess over the threat, castigating those who lent moral support to it and exhorting the nation to maintain a watchful eye for those who were susceptible to radicalization.
But because the threat comes from the left, there is no urgency in confronting it. Rather, we get news reports like the Washington Post’s, which are practically designed to reassure readers that there is no real threat here.
So, the assassinations and assassination attempts, aspiring and successful terror plots, and mob assaults on American metros will continue. After all, no one with influence or authority seems all that interested in putting a stop to it.