Twenty-five years and trillions of tax dollars since 9/11, and now the national security big brains want us to believe that today’s terrorism threat is as bad as it was when the planes slammed into the Twin Towers.
Ridiculous as the claim is, it’s being echoed by everyone from the White House to the Mamdani administration, with language so similar it’s eerie.
Start with White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, who warned in an ▶interview this week of a “new alliance between the jihadists and the Marxists like Antifa and the transgender killers.” The way Gorka tells it, the terror threat embodied by 9/11 hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just evolved.
“Do enough Americans understand what’s happened, the evolution of the threat in the last 25 years?” he asked. “It’s this devilish concoction, this admixture of the jihadis and the communists — what we call in the White House the red-green alliance.”
Gorka is mad as a hatter, but he sits atop the national counterterrorism food chain, as I’ve written. And yet compare that with how NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch put it earlier this year: “In fact, in my 18 years in government, I have not seen a threat environment quite like this one in terms of the multitude of vectors that are all active at the same time. These threats are real. They are deadly serious, and we must be prepared.”
Rebecca Ulam Weiner, NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, was no less alarmist, saying this week: “It’s an everything, everywhere all at once terrorist threat environment.”
Weiner went even further in a security briefing on Wednesday, channeling Gorka in alluding to a “far-left” threat among others like “conspiracy theories, grievances [and] nihilistic violence,” whatever that means. Again, Weiner's remarks rest on the same premise as Gorka's: Al-Qaeda and ISIS may be in decline, but the terror threat is evolving to encompass Americans at home. What good fortune for the counterterrorism industry!
Weiner said:
“The threat is quite different from where it was 25 years ago. It’s decentralized geographically with the rise of al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates globally. It’s diversified tremendously ideologically. Now we’re not primarily dealing with al-Qaeda or even al-Qaeda-ISIS, but a proliferation of threats coming from conspiracy theories, grievances, nihilistic violence, far-left, far-right, anti-government [and] all of those things.
It’s a much more individualized and idiosyncratic threat, which means that we have to be on our toes. … We have to be forward-leaning and very much everywhere, all over the place, to confront this new, modern 2026 threat, which is exactly what we’ve been doing.”
Ken Dilanian, a longtime national security correspondent at liberal MSNOW (who many are calling “CIA Ken” due to his infamous coziness with the agencies he covers) adds his own warning, that somehow, in this era of record national security budgets, these agencies need ever more money, personnel and other resources. Never mind that Trump’s official budget request seeks an eye-watering 40 percent increase to the Pentagon budget ($1.5 trillion), or an 18 percent increase to the FBI’s budget ($2 billion).
“There are many veterans of the war on terror who say Americans are unknowingly living in a uniquely dangerous time when it comes to terrorism,” Dilanian writes. Listen to his experts who think that the situation is even worse, that “the United States is more vulnerable to a horrific reprise [of 9/11] today than it has been in years.”
I’d like to challenge CIA Ken to a bet that terrorism won’t claim 3,000 American lives this year, or next, or the year after that. And in the unlikely event an attack of that magnitude does occur, I promise you the national security “experts” won’t see it coming or detect it, regardless of how much funding they have.
If there's a real threat, it's the Washington consensus that we're living through some unprecedented moment of mortal danger. That claim is what keeps the national security money flowing (and by extension the money for its adjuncts in the corporate media). It's how you get a White House official fretting about communism (in 2026!) and a Mamdani administration official warning of "far-left" terrorism. What connects them isn't a rise in actual terrorism or anything resembling a 9/11-scale threat. It's social media, which in their telling means too much liberty and too much free speech.
The supposed experts who think they understand America better than the rest of us, along with the domestic threats to liberty and to the United States itself, all share some version of the same argument: that the internet is an unprecedented, extremism-generating "chaos machine," to borrow the title of former New York Times journalist Max Fisher's book. The chaos machine exposes public displeasure with Donald Trump, the innate contempt for government tyranny symbolized as everyone from the NYPD to ICE to the FBI and CIA, dissatisfaction with the elite, the opinion shapers, the priorities of the country, the inequities of society, and in general, for the dated old ways.
The national security types call that terrorism.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
