Prelude To A Powder Keg
Our Homeland Security Machinery Is Less Ready For Risk Than In Decades - We May Need To Be Ready To Not Panic & To Hold Things Together
Too many things to say today. Too many things to write.
We’re traipsing around along a precipice. It’s just about 20 hours ‘til hopefully democracy-minded Americans in jurisdictions everywhere start counting votes. Then what? Will there be violence before then? After?
Will we get to vote without having to navigate angry right-wing extremist citizens standing by outside polling places with their intimidating cameras and emotional-support AR-15s? Will we get to vote without having to answer questions from law enforcement officers in front of the ballot box; as at least one Pennsylvania county is doing?
The Precipice Is Real
I asked my internal Facebook connections this weekend what they were picking up on. “Does it feel like things are weird? Are you holding your breath? Are we all?”
I got 140+ comments… and it’s still going. One comment that jumped out is from a good friend: “Something feels imminent. I hope I’m wrong.”
Yeah. Something does indeed feel imminent.
It’s not mystical. This isn’t some woo-woo, new-age vibe.
It’s basic threat monitoring, intel analysis, and studies of historical precedent when an authoritarian movement gets real traction. It’s alarming as hell. I cannot believe I spent a decade after 9/11 in the homeland security and national security worlds in two federal departments and six jobs… only to come to the moment where our biggest threat is from our own damn citizens. Including our own politicians, huge media platforms, advertisers that support those politicians and media, and law enforcement and military professionals.
Yeah. Definitely alarming. And it does feel like something imminent is on the horizon.
The Threats Changed, Our Prep Has Worsened, & We’re More Vulnerable
Sunday I started watching a movie today called Executive Decision, released in 1996. I hesitated to even start it but I like to watch story stuff with lunch or dinner, and it was on the DVR. I hesitated because it looked like work; but I’d recorded it because one of the actors is a favorite — Oliver Platt. I made it one-third of the way in… and it definitely felt like work. Terrorists on an airplane, compounded risks, think tanks, DOD, situation rooms, and so on. Plus I can’t believe the Wikipedia write-up doesn’t have more discussion on the plot point about using a plane as a weapon itself in that pre-9/11 era. But I digress.
Almost every day since January 6, 2021, I’ve thought about my homeland security career. Every freaking day. Watching the beginning of that movie… just underscores it.
I came here to write some kind of analysis on the present moment in the light of my own years of experience. Moments. Long, extended, multi-year efforts. Meetings and insanity and big hopes against the spectre of big threats. All of that so frequently comes to the surface in my life in this time of disruption. Over and over and over and over.
It’s on my mind because so much of the risk that our government agencies at every level built huge, complicated systems and processes to prepare for is not the risk landscape the US is facing now.
Nope. Not at all.
It’s not even the same moral landscape. Or national priority landscape.
Or, apparently, in the case of the US Capitol Police (USCP)… the appropriate systems and processes were either never built, or have completely eroded. What in the %*@# kind of law enforcement agency doesn’t have a human presence on the ground at the home of the person in line for the presidency; after the Vice President? Or real-time security camera monitoring? Have they lost their ever-loving minds over there?
We all thought January 6 was bad, and that USCP was unprepared and/or out of the loop and/or willfully blind to the threats that day… but are you freaking kidding me???? What are they even doing?
Yes I am judging. We all should be. We should expect institutions and especially law enforcement and intelligence oriented institutions to have their act a little more together. I’m understating it. They should have their act WAY more together. They’re supposed to be thinking many steps ahead of the general public. It’s called INTELLIGENCE, for crying out loud.
We depend on it.
Worse, much of what we as a country did actually build to deal with even far-off, theoretically unlikely threats of domestic unrest or domestic violent extremism (DVE) in the post-9/11 world has since been dismantled.
Reporting indicates that the Trump Administration began dismantling and refocusing domestic security mechanisms immediately in 2017, and ramped up that disassembly in the summer and fall of 2020 during and after nationwide protests responding to the murder of George Floyd. This is the same time period in which Trump was already setting the stage for “the big lie;” talking about questionable election results. The disassembling of US domestic homeland security networks, surveillance, intelligence monitoring, intelligence sharing, alerts, bulletins, and reports has received almost no media coverage or public government scrutiny at all — yet this set of capabilities was the exact set of capabilities that had been put in place years before to provide exactly the kind of intelligence sharing and preparedness that turned out to be largely missing for January 6, 2021. And that missed or missing intelligence and preparedness occurred even as some of the threats and ramp-up in activity by extremists and by Trump-associated insurrection and coup plotters was quite public.
In the more immediate lead-up to January 6, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf didn’t designate January 6, 2021 as a National Security Special Event (NSSE); a preparedness designation perfectly designed for just such a threat scenario. It’s been 21 months, and we still have no earthly idea if the intelligence and security mechanisms inside DHS and connected to the larger intelligence community (IC) recommended that Acting DHS Secretary Wolf designate January 6 as an NSSE and what his reaction was — or Mr. Trump’s. Wolf resigned not long after January 6 in 2021 just as reporters started looking into his January 6 actions or willful obstruction; attention shifted elsewhere immediately afterward due to the volume of havoc and the availability of so much other destabilizing scandal. Wolf also may have had a hand in not mobilizing or authorizing (for funding) state government mutual aid for January 6 and for the post-January 6 security posture response. But we’re not collectively talking about any of that.
We don’t know how broken DHS and the other related interagency IC and national security structures are that tie to NSSE designation, because we don’t have answers about what happened. We don’t even have public questions. The only homeland security topic that seems to get national attention is on immigration — yet that’s not where the greater risk to our homeland security is.
Homeland security hasn’t been a true shared top national priority for some time; the House Select January 6 Committee hasn’t even bothered to dig in publicly to DHS, DOJ, the IC, and the national and homeland security preparedness posture and response to January 6 aside from a few mentions here and there. But there is a whole lot of unexamined bureaucratic cluster%*#k there, and that likely-unfixed mess makes us more vulnerable.
I hate to mostly-swear, but what we’re dealing with is absolutely obscene. It’s not okay, and we’re barely even talking about it. There is no national narrative on this.
The House Select January 6 Committee is the only overarching federal or national examination of what went wrong before and after January 6, and the scope is dangerously limited.
No other overarching investigative interagency after-action effort has occurred; whether bipartisan or whether limited to the Executive Branch.
Instead, current President Biden has actually kept on many of the political appointees from the Trump Administration who had questionable roles in undermining our homeland and national security before and after January 6… and since.
Aside from those leadership positions, the bureaucratic trouble is deep and wide — but we’ve got no sign that there’s any collective internal government-wide reflection and problem-solving on any of that.
The DHS examples are a few things in one department. How much of a mess remains in the rest of the federal government? That enormous unaddressed mess leaves us more vulnerable here on election eve in a moment where we have the greatest domestic violent extremism threat that we’ve seen in the US since January 6, 2021 — and otherwise perhaps since the Murrah Building was blown up in 1995.
Although one could argue that we are always at the risk of a major mass shooting. The mass shooting in Las Vegas from the Mandalay Bay hotel in October, 2017 killed 60 people and wounded at least 413; with more than 1,000 bullets fired.
Does that kind of risk increase, given the current election-related threat advisory? Probably. It’s likely one reason why an American culture very aware of this ever-present spectre takes the threat of political violence so damn seriously. Any mass shooter story is one too many. The modern political violence threat is for more. There’s no confusion about that; the guns and corresponding insinuations are in political ads, on Instagram, and on tweets. It’s a powerful threat. It carries force.
Will it erupt? When and if it does — it may well be more powerful than any powder keg or explosive most Americans could get their hands on. And what could that catalyze?
Again, we’re treading along a precipice. Our government agencies at every level are not in an optimal place to handle whatever crises explode out of the metaphorical powder keg. We haven’t just failed to do a federal interagency assessment and overhaul of our homeland security systems post-insurrection. We’ve failed to it nationally, and neither DHS nor DOJ are aggressively leading such a charge for state and local government.
One tiny solace does exist — and you may need to pass this around for election day especially because Twitter undermined its entire account authentication protocol today (update: after publishing, I learned that Musk is now waiting until after the midterms to make this change at Twitter); and fired its entire content monitoring and verification staff on Friday. DHS Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is doing rumour control, and Secretaries of State are doing election monitoring for election day. Ope! At least some of that relies on Twitter… the websites say they’ll be live-tweeting (insert face-palm). Oh boy. Well, here we go. Hopefully on election day they have some verifiable alternative out somewhere. How’s all that for a segway into the next header?
Our Culture Is Undermining Our Security
There are entire books, PhD dissertations, and think tank treatises on what we were supposed to build after 9/11. The long and the short of it is we were supposed to end up more secure; with more mechanisms for intel-sharing, more mechanisms for surveillance and intel monitoring domestically and internationally, lots more interagency cooperation, more public private partnership cooperation, more forward-leaning threat detection, improved communication in all the places and in all the ways, system interoperability and standards for everything in all of those zones, and more integrated emergency and law enforcement responses when the worst-case scenarios transpired.
We (the US) did do a lot — together. One example of what we (the US) built was the overall system of interconnected pieces and parts meant to help monitor and share intel, and to take appropriate action in response. Every federal department has some kind of operations center or watch office for threat monitoring, information sharing, and response coordination. There’s a National Operations Center (NOC) at DHS that’s meant to connect threats and intel from the entire rest of the government. All of these systems tie to the emergency response systems domestically if there is an attack or disaster. These big systems also tie to critical infrastructure systems that monitor and help to coordinate on threats to infrastructure, infrastructure interruptions, cascading infrastructure failure system effects, and infrastructure restoration.
For law enforcement and intelligence, there are interagency fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) at state, local, tribal, and territorial levels in various configurations; sometimes integrated with state or local emergency operations centers (EOCs), and sometimes not. Security cameras and other surveillance capabilities at government buildings and in public spaces where protests might occur such as parks or monuments are often connected to some of these centers and capabilities. There were processes for things like Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to get intel in from “the field,” and for sharing intel on domestic threats including for DVE, human or drug trafficking, and basic criminality. There were also processes for sending related alerts, analysis, and advisories out to local, state, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies about international or domestic threats. There are standards, protocols, policies, systems, and various levels of development and success for all of those things.
All of it mixed together was a whole big mess but fairly intact — before the Trump Administration came in and jacked a lot of it up as noted in the sections above. “Jacked up” seems like the most appropriate term, too… especially because we don’t know publicly what the current state of all of that is inside government.
Related, we know that law enforcement and military agencies at every level all have individuals within them who are sympathetic to the Trumpist MAGA movement, to Trump, or to the insurrection — or who are election-deniers. This is part of why it’s a problem that we haven't had a coordinated, proactive, aggressive national post-insurrection after-action investigative push led by DHS and/or DOJ to figure out what we need to do differently in this new risk landscape to sort out some of this maelstrom.
At this point it is difficult to know how intact or functional this big mess of domestic homeland security systems is here on the eve of a major threat of violence, civil unrest, and societal upheaval.
In the post-9/11 world, DHS defined risk as threats + vulnerabilities + consequences. There are entire bureaucratic systems and priorities that were built around that calculation.
It means that risk includes threats like the DVE threat right now; vulnerabilities like how we’re more vulnerable as we haven’t fixed much of what went wrong in government before, during, and after January 6; and consequences like reduced trust in government and institutions which contributes to authoritarianism, or like injuries and deaths from a DVE attack.
Twenty-one years after 9/11, we should have reduced our collective risk across the the entire risk landscape. Instead, it’s higher.
We’re at greater risk because of the combination of factors that have increased domestic threats, made us less likely to actively counter those threats (due to cultural and culture war pressures), increased our vulnerabilities at every level, and increased potential consequences largely due to the widespread availability of and access to military grade weaponry.
In the old days, a potential terrorist needed to buy supplies to make bombs to do big damage… and after the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma in 1995 — we kept a better eye collectively (between government agencies) on the sale of those things After 9/11, we kept an eye on all kinds of sales of bomb-making things; or mass purchases of items like burn phones to coordinate attacks.
Now, any would-be terrorist can buy whatever weapons they’d like, because we’ve enabled access to firearms and reduced our ability to oversee or track them. People can also now communicate on a wide array of encrypted devices and secure capabilities. An enterprising terrorist can plan and potentially pull off quite an operation that would be difficult to detect ahead of time. That’s the risk landscape we’re in.
The insurrection could have been spectacularly worse (and potentially successful) if the District of Columbia didn’t have such a restrictive gun law. Secure communications are not a requirement for enterprising terrorists today: many of the insurrectionists were quite public about what they were threatening prior to that date, broadcast or posted what they were doing live as they were doing it, and then walked away from the crime scene at the US Capitol. Walked right out. Many have not been found; hundreds have not yet been charged or prosecuted. The primary instigators of the insurrection itself and the related coup attempt have very much not been charged or prosecuted, either.
Not upholding the rule of law increases our vulnerabilities. Will DOJ choose to charge any politician or White House operative behind the leadership of the insurrection or coup attempt before Trump announces another run for president… or nah?
We’re not restricting access to weapons for mass killing, we’ve got encrypted communications capabilities in abundance, and we’re not clearly and consistently enforcing laws against attacks against American government institutions, buildings, officials, or law enforcement officers. What could go wrong?
Authoritarianism takes hold when institutions are weakened.
Neither Congress nor the Biden Administration have shown evidence that they have taken comprehensive steps to strengthen the law enforcement, homeland security, national security, continuity of Constitutional government, or intelligence community institutions since the insurrection and coup attempt. There’s been minimal public pressure to do so.
The House Select January 6 Committee has not attempted to drive the national narrative on the insurrection and coup attempt. Rather, they’ve had nine public hearings for a total of 18-27 hours; most not in prime-time; well over a year after the insurrection. The hearings have been densely packed with spectacular information. The media makes the choice to follow a few of the handpicked details from the very dense hearings for a few news cycles… and then they move on to something else. We all know more about Georgia US Senate Candidate Herschel Walker’s abortion drama than we know about what the January 6 Committee has unearthed.
We are not well set up now to handle the domestic violent extremist threat that’s out there; particularly if it turns into actual violence including injury and death. If our security landscape was tighter nationally, we would respond better. Our institutions are a mess, and we’re letting them stay that way.
Our culture is a mess, too, and that’s part of what is needed to handle big crisis. We’re not set up well for that part of crisis at all — especially if we actually have major or multiple domestic violent extremist attacks occur.
We don’t have strong narrative leadership at all from the US government or from the political party that has not been radicalized (Democrats) in reference to the domestic violent extremist threat. The only strong, loud, consistent narratives come from far-right extremists who are instigating more threats, aggression, election denial, and potential violence. They’ve spent much of the week since House Speaker Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a hammer in their largely unsecured home mocking him. Mocking the injuries done by a hammer to the skull of an 82-year-old man.
We haven’t had strong narrative leadership against political violence and insurrection activity since the insurrection occurred. We’ve had a lot of quiet, and a lot of guessing.
After 9/11, we had national conversations about this stuff… for years. Now, we are soooooo not doing that. The fact that we’re not having national conversations about all of this adds to our vulnerability and increases our risk (see the calculation above), because we’re not aware of what’s missing or wrong, and we’re not working collectively to fix any of it or to even pay more attention to it.
The national conversations and the national narrative matter — because again, they’re missing. How much worse will everything get if we have to deal with actual attacks?
It could get a lot worse. We are going to need to hold the line if it does. We are going to need to hold this country together. We can. We have tools. We should use them.
It’s Time To Find Our Voices — And Our Courage
If political violence in the form of domestic violent extremism does occur on election day, in response to election results, or on a more persistent basis in this country… we’re going to do need to do some things differently.
We need to come out of our collective shock response to this unfolding horror.
We’ve arguably been in that shock since January 6, 2021. Some might argue that it goes back to January 20, 2017… or to November 8, 2016. Either way, I think that shock is a huge part of why we haven’t had a stronger narrative pushback from our leaders. Shock — and denial. Neither are serving us now.
It’s time to talk about this stuff. It’s time to use our words. It’s time to find our words.
We need courageous people speaking out against these threats and violence to become the norm and not the exception.
We know that’s not the norm now because whenever someone does show some courage, a video of them standing up and fighting totally goes viral.
We’re craving that kind of leadership in this unprecedented risk landscape
We can bring it. We can lead. We can show courage.
Courage is contagious. Leadership is empowering. We can lead each other.
We can collectively push back on this violent, aggressive, nasty, bigoted, hateful toxicity that is becoming the norm up in this country. It is not okay to have giant F*CK BIDEN signs up in neighborhoods where we’re raising kids and communities, and on bumper stickers where our families see them in traffic. How did that get to become common; and acceptable enough that it’s widespread? It’s partly because we’re not pushing back enough. We can, though.
Shock, threats, fear, aggression, hate, bigotry, and violence are intended to help the powerful seize and accumulate additional power as fear and threats of violence cow the population, keep people hiding out, keep people disengaged, and keep people divided. It’s bullying — and it’s working. The bullying crowd are empowered, and are enjoying it.
After 9/11, we had a whole big push-back to that kind of BS. To terrorism. To fear.
We made intentional, collective decisions not to let fear run our day-to-day lives. Mostly (obviously with some major security changes; like at airports).
Where is that kind of major collective push-back to fear now?
After 9/11, we had collective rage. We were damn well not going to get bullied by terrorists. Damn straight. For a cultural reference, check the Toby Keith song “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue.” Also reference the billions we’ve spent on war since; and on eradicating terrorists worldwide. The damage path is wide.
Now the threat is inside. It’s from our friends and neighbors. It absolutely is. Check out the University of Chicago research on insurrectionist demographics, and then think about other indicators showing that extremism has spread since the insurrection. Other indicators show increases in extremist media audience numbers (FOX remains highly popular, with a growing viewership); a continued preponderance of related Q-Anon conspiracy theories; and persistent fundraising success by far-right politicians. The enthusiasm is strong.
We can counter the threat by re-weaving our social fabric.
By standing up for the vision and morals we want to see in this country. By building community and connection — by strengthening that which has been torn apart and weakened. We don’t have to build “across the aisle,” necessarily, either. We can strengthen connection and community with a huge array of pro-democracy people and groups that would be stronger now if we were better aligned and in bigger alliances and coalitions. If we were fighting together more aggressively. If we were championing what’s right, and calling out what’s absolutely not okay. We can start there, and we can build outward.
We can pressure businesses not to support extremism, intolerance, threats, and violence.
We can do things to drive the narrative. Way more than what we’ve been doing.
All of those things are the basics of the 5 Things we can do to Shift the Country. To shift the country toward a different path than the dystopian, intolerant, unkind, anti-democracy direction we’re currently headed in. It’s not okay. We can do and be so much better. So like — let’s go after it.
Shift the Country is starting up a series of post-election online workshops beginning November 14 to start working on all of this in bigger ways. Follow this Substack to hear about these working events as they’re announced. Please share this widely to help people find this work and join in. The more the merrier. For real.
There’s a whole lot of analysis out there about what’s not working in this country — books, newsletters, etc. Shift the Country does analysis, too, like this post right here.
But Shift the Country is unique in that it also brings a new nonprofit with a realistic approach to help us collectively counter and shift away from the domestic authoritarian extremist threats this country is facing today. We can chart the path together for a better, stronger, more resilient, kinder, more equitable country… and we can start on it now.
Because the path we’re on in the US is not okay. At this point, our “homeland” is not going to get secured by the mishegoss in government — at any level. We need a movement of the people and by the people to lead us down a different path. Shift the Country has a metaphorical map that anyone can use to get going. It’s achievable.
Let’s lay out a different path for this country. Let’s get to work on constructing it. And let’s start walking down that path. We can. It can have an impact, and we need it.
So let’s get going.
Quite an interesting assessment of where we find ourselves, how we got here, and what we need to do about it, Vanessa. I was struck particularly by what you wrote about how we "fought back" after 9/11 and our relatively weak response after January 6. I can't help but think this is at least in part attributable to the personas of the two presidents who led us (well, Biden after January 21). I don't intend this as a criticism of Biden--but his personality is very different from Bush's. Biden is the conciliator--and after the trauma of trump, lord knows we needed that. But unfortunately, the time for conciliation is now past. Bush was also "quick on the draw" to consolidate POWER...and Biden does not share that need; he wants us all to "get along." I also don't mean for this to be an apology for Biden. I share you concern that we haven't done anywhere near enough to combat the evil that trump set in motion while he was president and continues to foist upon us. There is so much, so much riding on the outcome of the election! But even if the Democrats manage somehow to hang onto power, we will be faced with the reality of a weakened state that is crying out for significant efforts to right itself--and I fear we will not get it. So whatever happens, we need to be prepared to stand up, be courageous and call out what we need to begin to repair our democracy.