Donald Trump’s new security directive labels anti-capitalist beliefs as a predictor of political violence. The irony: left-wing structural analysis actually pushes people away from lone-wolf attacks and toward mass organizing for change.
The document includes just one mention of “anarchist violent extremists” — the term the FBI uses when describing terror threats from people who view “capitalism and centralized government to be unnecessary and oppressive,” according to a May 2021 threat assessment.
But in congressional hearings, FBI Director Christopher Wray — who Biden chose to keep in place, restoring a tradition Trump broke — has extensively discussed the bureau’s work investigating people in that category.
“Antifa is a real thing,” Wray added at that hearing. “It’s not a group or an organization, it’s a movement or an ideology, maybe one way of thinking of it, and we have quite a number — and I’ve said this consistently since my first time appearing before this committee — we have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists. Some of those individuals self-identify with antifa.”
I took that to mean anarchists, since they specifically call them “anarchist violent extremists” but I suppose that’s an appropriately disingenuous take from the likes of Wray.
Not true?
Straight from the Politico article:
I took that to mean anarchists, since they specifically call them “anarchist violent extremists” but I suppose that’s an appropriately disingenuous take from the likes of Wray.