A New War on Terror
A New War on Terror
By Abe Greenwald
One of the reasons that virtually every voting segment moved rightward in the last election is that the Republican Party became the party of active change. People interested in seeing things actually happen found a new home.
Republican as change-agent was a new phenomenon, too. The right that once saw as its mission, as William F. Buckley famously put it, “standing athwart history, yelling stop,” found that yelling stop was no longer sufficient.
As Yuval Levin has noted, classic American conservatism comes from a place of gratitude. It’s about conserving those things we are grateful for. But what happens when the country is running dangerously low on such blessings? Donald Trump and his supporters rightly saw that merely stopping things in their place wouldn’t leave us with much worth conserving. Did we just want to hang onto a broken border, millions of new illegals, puberty-free children, DEI rule, and an academic aristocracy of anti-American, Jew-hating lunatics?
No, the job now would be to push these things back, to undo them. And that’s what Americans wanted. One of the few coherent sentences that came out of Kamala Harris’s mouth during her campaign was “We’re not going back,” and it was the last thing that voters wanted to hear. Americans needed out of the asylum. That’s the change Trump voters seek.
But after seeing the inevitable flourishing of deadly anti-Semitic violence, it’s clear that of all the things that need rolling back, the threat of terrorism should be the administration’s first priority. The shootings and firebombings might just be the start.
Several of the Biden-era failures have combined to leave the U.S. open to a potential attack on a spectacular scale. The Boulder firebomber was here illegally. There’s no telling how many more like him we’ll hear from. On Joe Biden’s watch, 5.5 to 6 million illegal immigrants entered the country. This includes more than 1.7 million “gotaways” currently living in the United States. Among these undocumented ghosts, several are on the U.S. terrorism watchlist. And don’t forget that, after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, we sacrificed the ability to closely monitor terrorist activity in the country from which Osama bin Laden launched the attacks of 9/11. We lost our eyes and ears there almost four years ago. That’s a lot of time to move operatives through a porous American border.
Now add in the leftwing-activist enthusiasm for jihad. The man who confessed to the double homicide of Jews in DC was a young socialist from Chicago. Today, the New York Post reports that Tarek Bazrouk, the Columbia “protester” indicted for three federal hate crimes against Jews, was part of a group that received regular updates directly from Hamas. He, too, is a U.S. citizen. It remains to be seen whether other pro-Hamas inciters had similar ties to foreign terrorists.
It’s not hard to imagine a growing nexus of homegrowns, illegals, and foreign actors coordinating a massive operation. Terrorists are like smokers—they find one another. And even if they don’t, any one of those subgroups now have sufficient numbers, and possibly resources, to launch a mass-casualty attack on their own.
So yelling stop won’t do it. We’ve been yelling stop, and they’re not stopping. It’s time for America to assume a broad and aggressive anti-terrorism posture once again. Yes, this means closing the border, sweeping up the radicals, and deporting the illegals. But it also means things like increased surveillance, terror-cell infiltration, and perhaps military confrontation abroad. No one on the left or right wants to hear it right now, but we’re headed further back than anyone realized.
Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.
