For the new White House tenants, the events of January 6, 2021 ushered an opportunity to refresh the progressive narrative and raise public hackles against soldiers and cops.  Throwing fuel on that Reichstag fire were approximately fifty arrested Capitol protesters with ties to the military and police.  Most had been separated from government service for years or decades.  Three were active army reservists and six were enlisted police officers who are now suspended or fired over their horseplay.

The Department of Justice has been relentless in its efforts to bring the Capitol invaders to heel.  Deeper and darker politically supercharged criminal and counterintelligence investigations have taken a second seat, to include those involving surveillance by the Obama inner circle on the Trump campaign, the compromise of careless Senate Democrats by moles from the Chinese Communist Party, eyewitness and digital evidence of Biden family swindles, and the textbook definition of treason from an Obama secretary of state who allegedly disclosed a close ally’s military strategy to a Mideast terror regime.

For their part, the FBI has been quick to act upon tens of thousands of leads from private citizens, poring over Capitol Police body cams and telephone and security videos as prima facie evidence to obtain hundreds of arrest and search warrants and indictments.  Special agents from every field division in the country have been tasked to work on the case.  Of those arrested, some have been imprisoned without bail, others are awaiting formal charges, and many will receive little more than misdemeanor trespassing complaints.  The whole episode has now become a latter-Day of Infamy for Democrats to blaspheme all of the conservative faith and a tiresome reason to permanently ban the former president from all social media posts.

As Inauguration Day approached, House Speaker Pelosi put up the cement and steel ramparts and the FBI conducted security checks on the 25,000 National Guard personnel assigned to security posts.  A dozen, five ten-thousandths of a percent, were sent packing, their reputations and careers sullied by politically inappropriate comments and texts or for behaviors still unexplained. None had confirmed ties to extremist groups.

Four months later, the Capitol is still a citadel and January 6 remains the gift that keeps the Democrat media flacks in print and Republicans diving for cover.  The nine active duty soldiers and cops arrested by the FBI have become the cause cèlébre for Joe Biden to have misgivings over the remaining 19 million under arms here and abroad.

Newly-minted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a retired Army four-star now on leave from the boardroom of defense contractor Raytheon, placed the entire U.S. military into a 60-day staggered stand down, dropping its guard to hunt a ghostly phalanx of extremists and racists plotting within the rank and file.  And while no such insurgent has raised his head across town at DHS, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has followed suit, launching a probe to reveal the internal menace but offering no details on the purity test that would expose the revolutionists on their payroll.

Evidence of a systemic insider threat at DHS or the Pentagon is woefully inadequate, but there are hallway anecdotes and loud acclamations by the ruling class that white supremacy is the most severe national security threat confronting the country.  We know this to be true because the teleprompter told Joe Biden as much during his recent SOTU address to Congress, even as al Qaeda, giddy over a military withdrawal from Afghanistan, promised a September 11 do-over for America.

For the U.S. military, much of the insider threat has taken place overseas on foreign battlefields and involved the treachery of coalition forces.  On the homefront, given the millions enlisted and mixtures of races, ethnicities, and cultures, the risk of green-on-green attacks has been de minimus.

In past attacks, behavior and rhetoric often presaged violent action.  At Fort Hood, Major Nidal Hasan radicalized in full view of the FBI and fellow soldiers and threw up more red flags than a Beijing military parade.  That embarrassment was promptly veiled as workplace violence during the early years of the Obama presidency.

In late 2019, a Pearl Harbor sailor with a vocal hatred for his supervisors and forced to undergo anger management counseling was still in possession of his issued weapons when he shot and killed two civilian shipyard workers and wounded a sailor.  Two days later, a Saudi student pilot invited for flight training at the Pensacola Naval Base suddenly revealed his jihadist leanings, killing three airmen with a sidearm in an incident that smacked of terrorism.

Against what apostasy the Beltway generals will now proceed after this declared war on domestic extremism by the commander-in-chief remains a mystery. Supremacism and extremism are Democrat wordsmithing at its best, meant to frighten on its face and dropped into the woke vocabulary without suffering an explanation or qualification.

Existing political activity regulations for soldiers and cops permits the expression of a personal opinion on political candidates and issues, short of outright threat.  Participation in political groups is governed by restrictions over activity, not membership.  This will likely change.  The Defense Department’s Diversity and Inclusion Board has already recommended that service members be banned from membership in hate groups, following guidance issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization that also condemns the VFW and American Legion for citing extreme hatred.  If the past is prologue, the scrubbing of conservative thought and opinion from social media platforms, and the dogged Capitol investigation conducted in utter disregard of the significant property and lives lost to months of unchecked rioting, offer more than a whiff of smoke that the coming inquisition will fall hard upon the political right.

The insider threat now being pushed by military and DHS appointees of the Biden administration is ill-defined, grounded in assumptions, and is precariously balanced on the events of January 6.  Since Austin’s official announcement of the stand down on February 5, thousands of listening sessions have been held across all branches.

The greatest concern among service members was the lack of a definition for extremism.  The Pentagon spokesman admitted that the numbers of insider extremists was small, “something over zero,” and suggested that they would keep looking until they found a problem.  Defense and DHS chiefs have an obligation to put flesh and bones on White House fancies, so the witch hunt will soon venture beyond evidence of extremist group membership and into shotgun approaches that will blindly vacuum up innocents for their ideological opinions, party affiliations, and sympathies.

Ideological purges are self-fulfilling prophecies.  A political culling of the military and law enforcement herd will keep raising the temperature of suspicion and unjustly disaffect and censure loyal servicemembers and civilians in ways that could bring about disunity, resistance, and disobedience in the ranks.  Those fortunate enough to survive the litmus of loyalty will endure classroom training by equity officers that will impart the dangerous misconception that the real enemy may be alongside them in the foxholes, not in their laser sights.

The top definition for "supremacist" in the trendy Urban Dictionary describes it as “once a term denoting racist beliefs, it has been taken by the Democratic party to mean anything or anyone not sharing Democratic party beliefs.  It's basically a meaningless insult.”  An insult it may be, but one that can easily be mishandled by military and federal law enforcement leaders to advance more sinister Democrat goals and strategies.  If we continue to erase history and obstruct its lessons, it will be harder to recognize the real supremacists and extremists in today’s battle space as those who are casting the political aspersions and pointing fingers.

Image: Library of Congress

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