More than any other single individual, Daryl Johnson can speak to the failure of the Republican Party to keep America safe from right-wing and white supremacist terrorism over the past few years. Most recently, he has spoken out to condemn the Trump administration’s stubborn rejection of facts and data on the danger that type of extremism poses. The impeached president has been out there spewing hate and fear while lying about which candidate will make Americans safer, while Johnson—along with former members of Trump’s own counterterrorism team—has been telling the truth. Trump is right about the fact that one candidate for president will have a far more positive impact on our safety. But he’s dead wrong about which one that is.
Mr. Johnson has been at this work for a long time, and has compiled quite a record of both being right about violent right-wing extremists, and of being attacked by conservatives who were attempting to coddle them. He served for a quarter century as a front-line participant in our government’s struggle against extremist terrorism. From 1991 to 1999 he was part of the U.S. Army’s counterterrorism efforts, then moved over to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), where for six years he analyzed radical anti-government groups. Then in 2004 Johnson moved over to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he became the lead domestic terrorism analyst for the next six years.
In April 2009, Johnson’s team produced a report called “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” From its key findings:
“The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.”
The report, which was produced for law enforcement officials, was leaked to a right-wing “shock jock” named Roger Hedgecock, who pushed it out into the conservative media ecosystem. At the time, conservative media mainstays like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and others went berserk, and Republican elected leaders such as then-Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner went right along with them. DHS ultimately withdrew the report and apologized to anyone offended.
The report has, over time, proven to be accurate in predicting the rise of right-wing and white supremacist terror. Johnson, understandably frustrated by these events, left the government in 2010. In addition to founding his own consulting firm, he also participated in Netroots Nation in 2017 as part of a panel on “The White Face of Domestic Terrorism: How Islamophobia Distorts the Reality of Terrorist Violence in America.”
Although he characterizes himself as a Republican who “personifies conservatism,” Johnson has been a consistent and harsh critic of the current administration’s approach to right-wing, white supremacist terrorism. Only a few months after The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote was inaugurated, Johnson wrote a Washington Post column. “Heated political campaigning by Donald Trump in 2016 pandered to these extremists,” he warned. “Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge.” He added that Trump has “placated white supremacists and anti-government extremists ... Rhetoric from the president has further emboldened the alt-right.”
In 2019, speaking to Chauncey DeVega at Salon, Johnson compared the two parties on this issue. “On the Republican side it is denial. I believe the Democrats are more or less in agreement that there is a problem and they want to do something about it ... The Republicans do this as part of a deliberate strategy on their part to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, because they depend on those emotions to win elections.”
Just this month, as we’ve seen reports of the Trump White House’s deliberate malpractice when it comes to protecting Americans from white supremacist and right-wing terrorism (I looked at the matter in my own post), Johnson has continued to speak out. “It’s government dysfunction and bureaucracy at its worst.” Regarding the administration’s focus on antifa (which is not even an actual group or organization, as Trump’s own FBI director recently explained, contradicting his boss), he added: “The administration coming out and naming one group ‘terrorists’ and not saying anything about white nationalism? It’s ridiculous.”
Daily Kos’ own David Neiwert interviewed Johnson for a post last week that discussed the report made by whistleblower Brian Murphy, head of the intelligence office for DHS, on these failings. Johnson told Neiwert that there are “people in the department who I guess are reluctant to acknowledge that threat and do something about it. So they’re still dragging their feet.” He added: “The positive thing is that there are people higher in the department at higher levels who see that it’s a problem, that white supremacy is an issue and a national-security concern. But they’re being offset by these people that don’t want that to happen.”
Clearly, Johnson knows what the problem is. The problem is Donald Trump, and the people he has appointed to high positions in our government’s counterterrorism infrastructure. They are making us less safe because they consistently put politics above actually protecting Americans from threats that Trump himself, as Johnson noted above, is exacerbating.
And Johnson isn’t the only person—or even the only Republican—who’s saying so. Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann, both high-ranking officials in DHS and past Republican voters, have recorded lengthy videos endorsing Joe Biden over Trump this fall. They’ve also been quoted by multiple media outlets describing the failings of the Trump administration to respond appropriately to the information their own experts in government have provided about the danger posed by white nationalist, right-wing terrorism.
Johnson has not formally endorsed Biden, although his previously cited comments speak for themselves.
As for what Biden will do, most importantly he will listen to facts. He rejects Trump’s approach to white supremacist extremism in every imaginable way—both in terms of tactics as well as rhetoric. On the one hand, Trump can’t stop himself from playing footsie with those thugs, as seen in such comments as his disgusting assertion that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville. Biden, on the other hand, put those exact words from Trump at the center of his announcement for president, starting his remarks with the words: “Charlottesville, Virginia.”
The former vice president cited what Trump said, the words that “stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation.” Biden added: “With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I'd ever seen in my lifetime.” Biden will never ignore or downplay the threat posed by white supremacist extremists. And he will do the opposite of feeding their hate—he will directly combat it.
In August 2019, after a white supremacist parroting Trump’s fearmongering regarding Latino immigrants murdered 20 people in an El Paso Walmart, Biden returned to this theme, proclaiming that the racist-in-chief’s rhetoric “almost legitimizes these people coming out from under the rocks. This is white nationalism. This is terrorism of a different sort, but it's still terrorism.”
More recently, after violence in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, followed peaceful protests for Black lives, Biden made clear where he stands and called on his opponent to do what he has still not yet done in a forceful and thorough way: condemn extremism coming from the right wing.
The next day, the Democratic nominee continued: “This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can't stop the violence because for years he's fomented it.”
Even more recently, on Thursday night at a CNN Town Hall, Biden called out Trump one more time:
I've condemned every form of violence, no matter what the source is. No matter what the source is. The President is yet to condemn, as you've probably noticed, the far-right and the white supremacist, and those guys walking around with the AK-47s and not doing a damn thing about them.
I'm waiting for the day when he says I condemn all those white (supremacists).
On the Biden-Harris campaign website, separate from a detailed array of policies on gun violence more broadly, there are clear proposals to address white supremacist and anti-Semitic extremist hatred and violence. First, one has to identify that a problem exists in order to combat it, something Trump simply has not done.
A section entitled “The Rising Tide of Hate, Bigotry and Anti-Semitism under Donald Trump” notes that since Trump took office, America has witnessed a “historic increase” in hate crimes against Jews and other minority communities. Going further, Biden’s site explains that “Trump, in clear language and in code, dangerously encourages and emboldens xenophobia, prejudice, and hatred among white nationalists and anti-Semites,” adding that Biden will “call hate by its proper name, whatever its source, and condemn it—every time.”
In terms of action, the campaign outlines the following steps:
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Restore funding for a critical effort to address domestic extremism, which the Trump administration has cut.
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Work for a domestic terrorism law that respects free speech and civil liberties, while making the same commitment to root out domestic terrorism as we have to stopping international terrorism. Biden will appoint leadership at the Department of Justice who will prioritize the prosecution of hate crimes.
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Break the nexus between extremism and gun violence by enacting sensible gun control laws, banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines to get these weapons of war off our streets.
Additional specifics are discussed elsewhere on the campaign website and include society-wide education efforts and prioritizing prosecution of certain hate crimes, as well as increasing the severity of punishments for them.
President Charlottesville’s simple unwillingness to take action to protect Americans from the danger posed by the right-wing/white supremacist element of his own base belies any fearmongering claims his campaign makes about the impact a Biden victory would have on our safety. In reality, Biden would make the American people safer, because he would hire and take advice from people like Daryl Johnson and other professional counterterrorism experts whom right-wing hacks have driven out of government service. Having them back on the job in a Biden presidency should let all of us sleep better at night, and feel more safe during the day.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)