President Trump signed a new counterterrorism strategy identifying three primary threats to the United States: narco-terrorists and transnational gangs, global jihadists including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and violent left-wing extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists.
These categories are not as distinct as they appear. Domestic left-wing organizations have documented operational ties to Hamas-linked networks, with the same financial infrastructure financing campus encampments, Gaza flotillas organized by designated terrorist entities, and solidarity operations supporting hostile foreign governments.
Open borders and opposition to immigration enforcement, central tenets of the left-wing political program, directly enabled the transnational gangs and cartel networks responsible for human trafficking, drug trafficking, fentanyl overdose deaths, gang violence, rape, intimidation, and murder in American communities, making the three threat categories, in practice, mutually reinforcing.
The 16-page document reorients federal priorities away from the white supremacist organizations Biden designated as the primary domestic threat, groups that produced no operational terrorism record, and toward left-wing, jihadist-linked, and transnational criminal networks that were generating documented mass violence, territorial seizures, and attacks on federal law enforcement throughout the Biden years.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence annual threat assessments continued throughout Biden’s tenure to lead with China, Russia, Iran, and transnational terrorism, not domestic right-wing groups, as top-tier strategic threats.
The FBI’s 2021 congressional testimony declared racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically white supremacists, the top domestic terrorism threat, citing incident counts from 2018 and 2019, two years in which white supremacists were the primary source of lethal domestic attacks. The FBI did not disclose that in 2020, the year before that testimony, no lethal attacks were committed by white supremacists at all, and that three of the four lethal domestic extremist attacks that year were carried out by left-wing anarchist.
The most documented of those was the August 2020 killing of Patriot Prayer supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a self-described “100% antifa” supporter who told a journalist he had no regrets.
The statistical case was methodologically flawed regardless, counting incidents rather than measuring organizational capacity, lethality, or coordinated group activity, and including lone actors with no organizational affiliation. The result was a picture that supported a political narrative without establishing that named organizations, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or KKK, were running operational terrorism campaigns inside the United States. None were.
Hellbound and Down 