Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As much as it pains me to say it, I actually have something in common with a member of the Obama administration, specifically, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.
“The lone wolf, that’s the thing that presents the challenge most directly for our homeland, it’s frankly the thing that keeps me up at night and it requires a whole of government response,” Johnson said, speaking on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks that have screwed up our laws and foreign policy ever since.
I too am most concerned about so-called “lone wolf” attacks, far more so than I am about another large, orchestrated plot involving foreign governments, like 9/11. Not because I’m afraid of being killed in such an attack, I’m not because I understand statistics and probability. No, in fact, the most terrifying threat posed by lone wolves comes not from the lone wolves themselves. No, the real threat was alluded to in Johnson’s own comments.
“…and it requires a whole of government response.”
Unless we all just contracted amnesia, we can remember the “whole of government” response to the 9/11 attacks, specifically, we got a whole lot more government – and all of it evil; and much of it unknown to most of us until Edward Snowden heroically blew the whistle.
After the nightclub shooting in Orlando, we got a glimpse of the sort of “whole of government response” Johnson is talking about when house democrats threw a tantrum of a sit-in protest, demanding the power to circumvent due process rights for anyone the FBI thinks might be bad. Indeed, the biggest threat terrorism poses to the average American citizen doesn’t come from terrorists themselves, or the actions they undertake. No, the biggest threat to the average American citizen related to terrorism comes from the response of the federal government of the United States to it. Some 3,000 people died on 9/11. In the fifteen years since, the rights of some 300 million Americans have been wholesale violated at all levels by government. Forty-nine people tragically died in Orlando at the hands of a terrorist, the “whole of government” response was to try as hard as possible to disarm as many American citizens as possible.
It’s getting to the point where dying in a terrorist attack is more attractive to me than living with the government abuses that occur in the aftermath of one. I suppose that is a pretty clear indication that the terrorists have won.
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