Old Joe Biden’s handlers have made it abundantly clear, with an astonishing indifference to any need to provide actual corroborating evidence, that it thinks “white supremacist” terrorism is the biggest threat the country faces today. Even that nod to woke authoritarianism, however, isn’t good enough for one Heidi Peltier, who is, according to the UK’s Guardian, a “senior researcher at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and director of programs for the Costs of War Project.” Peltier showed the way to the future when she penned an opinion piece in the Guardian entitled “It’s time to shift from the ‘war on terror’ to a war on climate change.” Because in the Left’s fantasy world, there is no jihad terror threat, and our resources are much better directed toward a hubristic initiative in economic and civilizational suicide.
“Large government bureaucracies,” Peltier informs us, “are often slow to adapt to changing realities, such as the catastrophic threats we face in a warming world. The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no exception.” How the Department of Homeland Security can be repurposed to control the weather, Peltier unfortunately did not explain.
“New research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project,” she went on to explain, “shows that the DHS has been overly focused on foreign and foreign-inspired terrorism, while violent attacks in the US have more often come from domestic sources. A combination of willful ignorance and institutional inertia caused the agency to miss the rise in white supremacy and domestic terrorism that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.”
Yeah, or maybe the whole thing was trumped-up, so to speak, and never was any manifestation of “white supremacy” or “domestic terrorism” at all, but of course that is an unacceptable departure from the establishment narrative. It seems that “new data from Dr Erik Dahl, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, show that just one of the 46 failed terror plots in the US from 2018 through 2020 was directed by a foreign organization. In contrast, 29 plots were planned or carried out by domestic groups. In 2019, DHS finally acknowledged the growing threat of targeted violence and domestic terrorism borne mainly of far-right ideology and white supremacy and issued its first strategy document identifying these threats.”
The foreign/domestic distinction is misleading. On October 18, an American convert to Islam in Chicago, Thomas Osadzinski, was convicted of providing support to ISIS. Another American convert to Islam, Damon Joseph, a 24-year-old resident of Holland, Ohio, was sentenced on September 20 to twenty years in prison for a plot to attack a synagogue in Toledo. Yet another American convert to Islam, Noelle Velentzas, got a 16-year prison sentence last June for jihad bombing plots in New York City. There are many others like them, but neither Heidi Peltier nor the feds have such people in mind when they speak of “domestic terrorism.” They don’t mean domestic jihad terrorism; they mean parents protesting at school board meetings, people who support Trump, and the like.
Related: Climate Change Is Not a Crisis
Nonetheless, Peltier plows on, positing that the threat of climate change is even worse than her domestic terror bogeyman: “While we know now that the threat of violent attacks from domestic sources outnumber those from foreign sources, a bigger source of insecurity still is that of climate change.” You’ll be happy to know that the Department of Homeland Security is on the job, using your taxpayer dollars to fix this little problem: “On October 21, the DHS released its first-ever ‘Strategic Framework for Addressing Climate Change,’ acknowledging the importance of climate as a source of disruption and threat to security. As the COP26 UN climate meetings start this week, it’s time for a recognition that climate change is in fact a more expensive, more deadly, and more real threat to lives and to the US economy than the threat of what we call terrorism.”
What’s more, the “War on Terror” just doesn’t fit the contemporary Leftist worldview: “The ‘War on Terror’ – a phrase born in the George W Bush administration – needs to be retired both as an action and a concept,” opines Peltier. “The word ‘terrorism’ instills a sense of fear and gives carte blanche for the US government to intervene around the globe.”
Heavens to betsy, the word “terrorism” makes people afraid? And what about the victims of terrorism? No word on that from the illustrious Brown University researcher. “Instead of wasting trillions of dollars and millions of lives fighting a war on terror,” she says, “the US should be mobilizing to combat climate change.” Why? Because “climate-related disasters have killed more Americans from flooding and wildfires than the 2,996 people who died in the 9/11 attacks.”
For all of Peltier’s skills as a researcher, however, she doesn’t appear to be aware that the Obama administration ended the war on terror in 2012. What’s more, the waste she decries in the war on terror is largely derived from the fact that it was wrongly conceived from the beginning, and wrongly executed all the way through.
In any case, she wants an end to Wilsonian messianic interventionism, and that would indeed be a good thing. But she wants the resources of the U.S. government to be devoted instead to fighting “climate change,” apparently unaware of the fact that such a fight will be just as empty and fruitless as the “war on terror,” if not even more so. It is, to say the least, unproven that human activity has caused climate change, and even more unproven that human activity can fix the climate. What’s more, the activities proposed are all being undertaken by the U.S. and Western Europe, while China ignores the problem and benefits economically from the West’s self-abnegation.
She says: “Climate-related disasters have killed more Americans from flooding and wildfires than the 2,996 people who died in the 9/11 attacks.” That may be, but again, there is no proof that this was the result of something human beings did. There have been floods and wildfires throughout history. Nor is it certain that ending the use of the internal combustion engine and the surrender of the West to Chinese economic hegemony will solve the problem.
But with “analyses” of this quality coming out of America’s universities today, it’s no wonder that Antifa has no problem filling its ranks.
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