The establishment Left seems determined to tar its opponents as “terrorists.” There’s the Jan. 6 Committee, which continues to investigate what the Democrats insist was an “insurrection,” despite a complete lack of evidence. There’s the repeated claim (that Biden, Garland, and Christopher Wray, among others, have repeated) that “white supremacists,” by which is meant “Trump supporters,” are the nation’s biggest terror threat. And now a former FBI counterintelligence official has gone the whole way and likened Trump supporters to “violent jihadists.”
Frank Figliuzzi is a national security analyst for NBC News, and would seem to have a fine resume for the job, having served as the assistant FBI director for counterintelligence for nearly a year and a half during the Obama administration. But like so many Obama/Biden appointees, he seems more interested in playing partisan politics and smearing the administration’s opposition as terrorists than in assessing actual threats to national security. On Wednesday, Figliuzzi went into full Big-Lie mode on MSNBC, even as he denounced the Big Lie that he claimed Trump supporters were spreading.
“Where we are right now,” Figliuzzi told Nicolle Wallace, is a “cult-like scenario.” The cult wasn’t, however, the group that insists that men such as Rachel Levine and Lia Thomas are women, that there are dozens of genders (including cake), and that Joe Biden is a competent leader; no, as far as this crack former fed was concerned, were those who insisted on reality in the face of those fantasies.
Raw Story reports that Figliuzzi explained that “Trumpism” (it was unclear if this word came from Raw Story or Figliuzzi) had “gone way beyond a political ideology. It is now the identity of a party. But it’s more than that because it’s now become a personal identity for those who consume the ‘Big Lie’ that the grand deception – and I can’t help because of my national security lens that I look at things through, to compare this to what we see in violent jihad.” As if aware of how ridiculous what he was saying really was, Figliuzzi anticipated the question: “What do I mean by that?” Apparently he meant that both Trump supporters and violent jihadis were chasing an illusion:
Yes, you have the purveyors and perpetrators of a ‘Big Lie.’ You become a martyr. You get this level of paradise. You go to Valhalla – here’s what happens: Those people are infidels. Yes, there are gurus and cultists and violent jihadists who preach that, but there’s also consumers who have to buy it and at the point where we’re at now, that supply and demand, the demand side of this are people who are consciously disregarding truth and reality.
Leftists come out with insane statements every day, and that’s on top of Joe Biden’s dementia syntax and Kamala Harris’ word salads, but this one from Figliuzzi really takes the cake gender. It’s certainly true that violent jihadists preach that paradise is guaranteed to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (Qur’an 9:111) and thereby attain Islamic martyrdom. But where is this concept in “Trumpism”? What is martyrdom in a Trumpian context? What is Trump’s paradise? Figliuzzi’s comparison fails miserably due to the fact that there simply is no real comparison between terrorists who are willing to murder and be killed in the service of their god and Americans who want to live in a nation with a sound economy, free and fair elections, reasonable prices, and a stable international situation.
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Nor does Figliuzzi even attempt to make such a comparison. Instead, he went out on the increasingly tenuous limb of claiming that there is no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. “You know,” he continued, “a year ago, two years ago, you and I would say things like, ‘Here’s how to be nice to loony relatives at Thanksgiving Dinner.’ ‘Here’s how to keep showing facts to people who need to see the facts more.’ ‘Oh, these poor victims have gone down an echo chamber. They’re living in a rabbit hole. How do we get them out?’ It is a conscious decision to accept the Big Lie. Why? Because it has become their personal identity. If they begin to reject the facts – there was no fraud, there was no systemic crimes committed that would have resulted in the overturning of liberty – if they reject that, they are literally rejecting their personal identity.” What does any of this have to do with violent jihadists? Unless you sit down to Thanksgiving Dinner with the family of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, nothing.
Figliuzzi went on to warn: “So this is a much harder nut to crack for us as a society. We not only need to hold accountable those who continue – like [Republican Senator] Ted Cruz Monday night on Fox – saying that January 6 was a ‘peaceful protest.’ He said it Monday night on Fox, it’s not only holding them accountable, it’s now figuring out what to do with those who consume deliberately by choice, the Big Lie, knowing that it’s wrong.” Hold Cruz accountable for stating a fact Figliuzzi doesn’t want known? That’s a crime now? Clearly this former FBI wonk thinks it should be. And that’s just part of the problem. There are, for example, still actual violent jihadists out there, while our intelligence agencies are busy trying to figure out how to curtail the freedom of speech and persecute Trump supporters. What could possibly go wrong?
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