By John Friend
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a liberal Democrat representing Maryland’s 8th Congressional district, continues to lead a politically motivated witch hunt into the supposed threat posed by “white supremacists,” who have been blamed again and again for the protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The events were actually a riot which has been falsely characterized by the mass media and Democratic political establishment as “a well-planned insurrection” whose ultimate goal was the overthrow of the U.S. government.
If it was, it was the most poorly planned and executed “insurrection” in world history. It is still to be determined what role agents provocateurs played in riling up portions of the crowd to commit acts of violence. In a letter sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray on March 9, Rep. Raskin—who also led the failed impeachment proceedings against former President Donald Trump—requested a briefing before Congress from the nation’s top law enforcement agency to “address the infiltration of law enforcement departments by white supremacists.”
“As the world now knows, on Jan. 6, 2021, irrefutable proof of this threat materialized on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, when off-duty law enforcement officers participated in the violent insurrection against Congress,” Raskin argued in the letter. “Given the FBI’s refusal just last year to admit that extremist police officers posed a serious threat to our nation’s security, I am now concerned that the [FBI] lacks an adequate strategy to respond to this clear and present danger to public safety.”
Raskin, the chairman of the House Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee, went on to demand the FBI respond to his request by March 26. In congressional testimony in early March, Wray noted that the agency has over 2,000 open investigations into domestic terrorism, vowing that the FBI “will not tolerate agitators and extremists who plan or commit violence.”
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have long hyped the threat of “white supremacy” and “domestic extremists,” and regularly emphasize the greatest threat to America emanates from “white supremacist extremists,” while largely ignoring and downplaying the well-planned violence, terrorism, and destruction committed by radical far leftwing groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
In addition to Raskin’s demonization of law enforcement and the blatant attempt to discredit police officers as “white supremacists” or “political extremists,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin—appointed by Joe Biden as the first black chief of the Pentagon— also announced a 60-day “stand down” across all branches of the military in early February in order to address alleged extremists within its ranks.
“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” Lloyd said while announcing his “stand down” order. “But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.” The efforts of Raskin, Lloyd, the Biden administration more broadly, and the Democratic establishment— working in conjunction with the fake news mass media— represent a dangerous and egregious attempt to demonize and persecute their political opposition by manufacturing false narratives and hyping alleged threats that they themselves, in many instances, manufacture.
