Making Americans Your Enemies
Kyle Shideler
https://americanmind.org/salvo/making-americans-your-enemies/How the government shifted its “Counter-Extremism” strategy to target the mainstream.
The narrative is here, and it doesn’t like you very much.
In recent remarks before members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, the chief of the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency claimed that domestic extremism has become “part of the cultural mainstream.”
Former DHS official and USA Today contributor Elizabeth Neumann agrees: “Far-Right Extremists went mainstream under Trump.”
“Extremists have gone mainstream,” echoes journalist Zahra Ahmad. “Lawyers, realtors and every-day folks make up their ranks.” Ahmad cites a figure suggesting a quarter of Americans hold “ideas incubated by white nationalists.”
Not to be left out, NPR warns that white extremism “seeps” into the mainstream. The Atlantic says the mainstream has gone extremist too. A study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats warns that most January 6 “insurrectionists” were mainstream to the extreme:
They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.
The Chicago Project is led by Robert Pape, a University of Chicago academic best known for declaring that Islamic extremism plays no role in suicide bombings and who once urged a U.S. government-identified front group for the terror organization Hamas to purchase copies to promote his book. So it’s an open question whether Pape and company can actually identify extremism when they see it.
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The Elites are the Extremists
This is not sustainable. The mainstream of a society cannot be extremist. It might be foolish, or misled, or prone to irrational things, as crowds often are. The mainstream of a society might even be immoral or wicked in an objective sense when measured against other societies. But what it cannot be is extreme. An elite, however, can be extremist. An elite’s views may be so outside the mainstream of the society, beholden to foreign ideologies, that their views are unrecognizable to those they purport to lead.
Perhaps it is finally time that America’s elite, who have been increasingly acting as occupiers, to pay mainstream Americans the same respect they previously deigned to provide only to foreigners committed to their ways of life.
Respect the mainstream’s traditions, and don’t mock their customs. Drink a cup of tea, or three, with their elders. Sit quietly, and nod politely, during their religious ceremonies. Let them run their own affairs.
And don’t treat them as the root cause of all the world’s evil
