Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Republicans confirm FBI has created a “MAGA Extremist” category ahead of the 2024 election.
Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.
And it isn’t just the people in her newsfeed. A growing chorus of security experts and politicians has cast the mob, or parts of it, in terms that are typically reserved for ISIS and Al Qaeda. Some commentators have even begun to call for a new American war on terror in response to the Capitol riot, one aimed at President Trump’s more radical supporters on the right.
That has stirred a broader debate about how best to fight right-wing domestic terrorism: with criminal laws already on the books, with new powers modeled on those crafted to fight Islamic terrorism after 9/11; or with some mix of the two. At the same time, it is raising new fears among rights advocates that civil liberties already eroded after 9/11 will be further diminished.
On Wednesday morning, while presiding over Trump’s impeachment in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to the rioters as “domestic terrorists,” a phrase that President-elect Joe Biden has also used to describe them. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for them to be put on a “no-fly list” of terrorism suspects, a measure that the FBI said it was “actively looking at.” Even veterans of the Trump Administration have urged the government to unleash the tools of counterterrorism, honed in the two decades since 9/11, against the perpetrators of the Capitol assault, their supporters and their associates.