Right-Wing Resurgence: How a Domestic Terrorist Threat is Being Ignored

Johnson, an expert on right-wing extremism and a former civil servant, landed in hot water after a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism leaked to the public. Writing it was his responsibility as senior domestic terror analyst at the Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, but his use of that term generated a tremendous amount of political backlash and backtracking. He settles scores in this career history, disseminating information about threats to U.S. security that derive from ideologies fed by racism, the lagging economy, anti-government radicals, and increasingly diverse demographics. Johnson directs scorn at Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, for her contradictory statements regarding the importance of ideology in detecting domestic threats. He painstakingly establishes a record of domestic terrorism incidents, arguing that tracking how perpetrators recruit is essential. His descriptions of homegrown terrorist organizations' brutal murders and pursuit of biochemical weapons validates concerns about DHS's reorganization to exclusively focus on domestic Muslim extremism. Johnson, a lifelong Mormon, uses his beliefs to dispel Republican criticism that monitoring domestic groups is politically motivated by liberals, but left unaddressed is the lack of public outcry over continued associations of Islam with terrorism and political unwillingness to counter the phenomenon. (Sept.)