A Brief History of the Assault on Conservatives as ‘Violent Extremists’

By Janet Levy, AM THINKER

The assault on conservative Americans began several decades ago with attacks on traditional principles and values. Belief in individual liberty and responsibility, free enterprise, and the rule of law was willfully conflated with “right-wing extremism.” Pride in America, a desire to protect our borders, and opposition to illegal immigration were branded as xenophobic. Championing the constitutional right to bear arms was decried as gun-crazed zealotry. Belief in religion, natural law, and the sanctity of human life was maligned as backward and anachronistic.

This vilification of conservatives has coincided with a deliberate shift from the real threats: radical Islamic and leftist groups. Islamic terrorist attacks have been declared as having “nothing to do with Islam” or excused by spurious claims that the perpetrators were mentally ill or misunderstood religious doctrine. When a military psychiatrist massacred 13 people in Fort Hood yelling ‘Allahu akbar,’ it was dismissed as “workplace violence.” And the violence, arson, destruction of public property, and killing of citizens and police officers unleashed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the ‘Summer of Love’ are described as “mostly peaceful protests.”

Top Democrats haven’t shied away from embellishing the false narrative of a serious domestic terrorism threat from “right-wing extremists.” On his campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama demeaned working-class voters hit hard by job losses, saying, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” His statement aptly served the purpose of pillorying conservatives.

Ironically, when elected in 2009, President Obama’s first speech was to members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Cairo. It was praised by several MB affiliates deemed “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-funding trial in U.S. history, involving the transfer of $12 million to Hamas. The trial ended in 2008, with five indictments and the designation of over 300 MB-affiliates as co-conspirators. But material provided to the defense hasn’t yet been made public – or released even to Congress.

The shift in threat orientation — from Islamic groups to the right-wing – may perhaps be traced to 1993, following the first World Trade Center bombing. Then-president Bill Clinton had ordered FBI chief Louis Freeh to focus on domestic terrorists, or “right-wing militia groups.” As a result, valuable evidence of Al Qaeda operations, including the training of Arab nationals at U.S. flight schools, was ignored. Also disregarded was intelligence on Middle Eastern involvement in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Military intelligence efforts such as Able Danger and Operation Green Quest were peremptorily disbanded. The first had data-mined information on Al Qaeda networks linked to 9/11, and the second had amassed evidence of terror finance, including that by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Under President Obama, the department of homeland security (DHS) ratcheted up fears of “right-wing extremism.” Its 2009 report, released by its new secretary, Janet Napolitano, theorized that the election of the first mixed-race president, the recession, the possible passage of firearm restrictions, and veterans reintegrating into civilian life would catalyze right-wing radicalization and recruitment. The report even conjured up the absurd specter of menacing groups imagining a ‘New World Order.’

To bolster the level of alarm, it incorporated a statement from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) warning of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other white supremacists learning the art of warfare in the armed forces. The SPLC, a radical leftist advocacy group funded by George Soros, is a favorite of Democrat administrations, even of federal investigative agencies. The DHS report describes it as a “prominent civil rights organization.” The non-profit takes a bleak view of American society — as uniformly racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and seething with “racial violence” and intolerance for “those who are different.” It does not consider MB affiliates and radical Islamist and Left organizations as dangerous. Both Harper’s and The New Yorker have described SPLC as a cash cow that served its now-disgraced founder Morris Dees.

Continuing the saga of whitewashing Islamic threats is the Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the U.S. (TEVUS) database, created in 2009 by the Obama administration. Administered by the DHS, it uses taxpayer funds to amplify White and right-wing violence when little or no violence actually exists. The reporting methodology excludes violence perpetrated by non-whites and falsifies the racial identification of other violent perpetrators. For example, the 19 Arab hijackers who murdered 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks are described as “White/Caucasian, non-Hispanic.” (The TEVUS database does have ‘Arab’ as an option. However, the census does not include ‘Arab’, therefore, many Americans of Arab or Iranian origin end up describing themselves as White.) As a result, the maximum terror deaths are attributed to Whites, skewing statistics to make right-wing violence appear commonplace. TEVUS conveniently covers up the violence of BLM and fails to refer to Antifa even once.

In 2012, when the “National Security 5” — five members of Congress led by Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — called attention to the infiltration of government by MB operatives, they were criticized and their request for investigations was ignored. They had gathered a mountain of evidence, even identifying individual MB operatives in key positions, including those related to national security. The next year, the CIA, under John Brennan, who associated closely with Islamists, purged its training material of terms such as ‘jihad’ and ‘radical Islam.’ An interagency task force peopled with known MB sympathizers then extended the purge to all counterterrorism training material. Agents at all levels of military and law enforcement underwent mandatory retraining.

In 2017, yet another behemoth targeting conservatives was unleashed. Big Tech, the United Nations, the National Security Council, the European Union, and the British, French, and Canadian governments developed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) to share, flag, and remove terrorist content. Under the guidance of the notorious SPLC, the forum departed from its efforts to exclude content from radical Islamist groups and announced it was adding “white supremacist” and other “hate group” material they perceived as promoting “violent extremism.”

Deploying what’s called the Dynamic Matrix of Extremism and Terrorism (DMET), a secret database and instrument of censorship, GIFCT ostracizes, deplatforms, and demonetizes groups opposing abortion and vaccination, and disputing the official narrative on COVID-19, the Bundy family, Jihad Watch and others. It draws legal sustenance from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the Rabat Plan of Action, and the U.N.’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights while ignoring free speech, enshrined in the Constitution of the U.S.

During the Trump presidency, a wave of censorship of conservative voices swept social media. Material posted by leftist groups like Antifa and BLM and Islamist groups, no matter how inflammatory or violence-inciting, was allowed, while conservative groups were silenced. In 2019, a Project Veritas exposé featured a Google insider who revealed that conservative websites like American Thinker, Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, Rebel Media, and others were being targeted, censored, and blacklisted. The exposé video has disappeared from YouTube.

The demonization of patriots reached its nadir in the Big Lie that the January 6^th protests at the Capitol amounted to an “insurrection.” A legitimate protest against how the presidential elections were conducted was painted as seditious.  Last week, the DHS issued a terror warning conflating Americans protesting COVID-19 restrictions to jihadists who might strike on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  A DHS bulletin warned, “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists” may try to “exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the U.S. as a rationale to conduct attacks.”

The attacks on, and the maligning of, conservatives or those who advance narratives not favored by the Left have reached unimaginable proportions. They include constitutional violations such as wholesale censorship, vicious defamation, unjust imprisonment, unpunished assaults, and denial of rights to a fair and speedy trial. This perilous trajectory must be corrected. Otherwise, it will signal the end of our constitutional republic.