July 25: “Hamas Is Coming”

Law enforcement losing trust in FBI; Border czar redux; Jacob Siegel on "whole of society"

---

---

The Big Story

Yesterday, anti-Israel radicals funded by the American taxpayer (via tax-exempt nonprofits such as the WESPAC Foundation) and an American Maoist centimillionaire connected to the Chinese Communist Party (Neville Roy Singham) ransacked Washington, D.C., in a display of solidarity with international jihadism and the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. Protesters—some of them bearing the insignia of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, others wearing the red shirts of the Singham-funded Party for Socialism and Liberation—burned American flags, attacked bystanders, vandalized public monuments, and assaulted U.S. Park Police:

This was what the monument to Christopher Columbus outside Washington, D.C.’s Union Station looked like after the mostly peaceful protesters were finished with it:

Nine arrests were made, but don’t hold your breath waiting for justice. Earlier this week, we noted that the Democratic prosecutor in Austin, Texas, had dropped charges against all of the protesters arrested at the University of Texas at Austin’s encampment in April, citing bogus problems with evidence and the “fact” that the protesters were “students” engaged in First Amendment-protected speech. That’s despite contemporaneous reports from the university’s officials and police that about half of those arrested were professional agitators and that many had brought weapons, including guns and knives, to campus and assaulted or threatened police and university staff. Not that the rioters couldn’t be prosecuted, if there was the political will. As William Shipley, an attorney for some of the Jan. 6 defendants, observed on X, “Less conduct than you see here with the officer being dragged [in the video embedded above] put one of my clients in jail for 60 months.” 

Even absent prosecutions, however, pro-terror mobs do tend to alienate normal Americans, which is why elected Democrats rushed to distance themselves from Wednesday’s protest. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)—who allowed the Muslim Brotherhood PR front Council on American-Islamic Relations to use his office for an anti-Israel press conference in November—posted on X that “pro-Hamas cheers and messages of hate and antisemitism have no place in our country.” And presumptive presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a similar message on Thursday morning, releasing the following statement:

Harris’ statement was good, as far as it went—though note the emphasis on nonspecific “hate.” In his Wednesday evening address explaining why he was dropping out of the 2024 race, President Biden said, of the upcoming election, “America is going to have to choose between moving forward or backward, between hope or hate, between unity or division.” In other words, hate—even when perpetrated by leftist radicals—is the exclusive province of the GOP. 

Harris’ strong words were something of a change of tune for her. Earlier this month, Harris told The Nation that the young people protesting Israel were “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.” But that wasn’t the first time she expressed her support for deranged anti-Israel sentiment. Back in October, Harris, at a college Q&A session, praised the “leadership” of a student who condemned Israel’s U.S.-backed “genocide” of Palestinians, in a question that equated the bombing of Gaza to U.S. enforcement of immigration law. In 2021, Harris nodded along as a student accused Israel of “ethnic genocide,” then responded, “Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed.” She also called for an immediate cease-fire as early as March, contradicting her own administration’s then official policy. 

It’s not that we think Harris secretly sympathizes with the pro-Hamas rioters; we’re just not sure she believes in anything. A Thursday article in CNN on Harris’ foreign policy views noted:

Several people who have talked with Harris in depth about Israeli policy responded to CNN’s questions—on whether, for example, she would have done the same as Biden in sending some and halting other weapons to Israel—with a series of extended pauses and insistences that it’s impossible to judge hypotheticals.

The same article went on to say: 

Harris has so many different pulls on her that an aide did not give a direct answer when asked if the vice president considers herself a Zionist—a term Biden again proudly embraced just weeks ago.

Harris is smart enough to realize that no American politician can be seen to be on the side of foreign-funded Communists defacing monuments and assaulting cops. But she’s been placed in the role of nominee by Obama and the same party donors who have been bankrolling the anti-Israel protest movement since October, which makes us think that the pro-Palestinian voices who are “cautiously optimistic” about a Harris administration are right to be getting their hopes up. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Jacob Siegel on the “whole of society” effort to control what you think

---

The Rest

→Local law enforcement has developed a “disturbing loss of trust” in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a new whistleblower report presented to the GOP-controlled House Committee on the Judiciary on Wednesday. In some instances, local police are reluctant not only to collaborate with the FBI but also to share “actionable, substantive information on criminal and other intelligence-related activity,” due to a lack of trust in the FBI’s professionalism and suspicions that the bureau is operating as a “partisan federal agency.” One source, who served as a sergeant in the Major Crimes Division of a large local agency in the West, is quoted as saying: 

He/She cannot understand why the FBI is not going after Antifa, BLM, and pro-Palestinian rioters with the same vigor the FBI brought to bear against individuals associated with the events in and around the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.

Another law-enforcement veteran described a feeling among many local police officers that they could be targeted as “domestic extremists” by the FBI or the Department of Justice because of their patriotism and voting records. 

The report also references perceptions of declining competence and quality among new FBI agents and refers to several incidents of perceived political bias. One was a recent revelation from the conservative watchdog Empower Oversight that FBI investigators conducting security clearance probes were mandated to ask whether employees had vocalized support for Donald Trump or opposition to COVID-19 vaccines. 

Read Miranda Devine’s write-up of the report in the New York Post here. 

→Yesterday, we mentioned the media about-face on whether Kamala was ever “border czar,” but the shift was even more dramatic than we realized, as this clip from Newsbusters makes clear in our Video of the Day: 

→Was Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on the level of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural? No, but we thought it was pretty good, especially when graded on the curve of recent American oratory. But Democratic power-behind-the-throne Nancy Pelosi was less impressed: 

Tough crowd!

→One can only sympathize with the hostage families, who want their loved ones returned home at any price. But why hasn’t there been a deal yet? Putting aside Hamas’ unrealistic demands, there’s the simple fact that the longer Israel fights, the less incentive it has to make a deal. On Wednesday, for instance, the IDF recovered the bodies of five hostages from a tunnel inside a designated humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Each living or dead hostage recovered by the IDF means dozens fewer Palestinian terrorists and security prisoners to be released as part of a deal. Reuters reported on Wednesday that a “senior U.S. official” said that a deal was close and that President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu would work on closing the remaining gaps during their meeting today. 

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Iran Is Still Trying to Kill American Officials, by Judith Miller

Why is the Biden administration refusing to protect them?

---

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

---

Learn This Term: ‘Whole of Society’

You cannot understand what’s going with American politics today without it

by Jacob Siegel

To make sense of today’s form of American politics, it is necessary to understand a key term. It is not found in standard U.S. civics textbooks, but it is central to the new playbook of power: “whole of society.”

The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style.” Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.

And there’s an additional catch. “The government”—meaning the elected officials visible to the American public who appear to enact the policies that are carried out across the whole of society—is not the ultimate boss. Joe Biden may be the president but, as is now clear, that doesn’t mean he’s in charge of the party.

***

As a modern political trope, “whole of society” dates to the Obama administration's attempt to pivot in the war on Terror to what it called CVE—countering violent extremism. The idea was that by identifying at-risk individuals and then engaging them, American officials could “get left of the boom” and intervene before extremism led to violence.

In concept, the strategy called for empowering “community-led interventions” as a method of conflict resolution. In practice, the White House paired its progressive efforts at community activism with an aggressive expansion of counterterrorist operations and drone strikes.

But the true lasting legacy of the CVE model was that it justified mass surveillance of the Internet and social media platforms as a means to detect and de-radicalize potential extremists. Inherent in the very concept of the “violent extremist,” was a weaponized vagueness. A decade after 9/11, as Americans wearied of the war on terror, it became passé and politically suspicious to talk about jihadism or Islamic terrorism. Instead, the Obama national security establishment insisted that extremist violence was not the result of particular ideologies and therefore more prevalent in certain cultures than in others, but rather its own free-floating ideological contagion. Given these criticisms Obama could have tried to end the War on Terror, but he chose not to. Instead, Obama’s nascent party state turned counterterrorism into a “whole-of-society” progressive cause by redirecting its instruments—most notably mass surveillance—against American citizens and the domestic extremists supposedly lurking in their midst.

A reflection on the 20-year anniversary of September 11 written in 2021 by Nicholas Rasmussen, the former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, captures this view. “Particularly with the growing threat to public safety and security posed by domestic violent extremism, it is essential that we move beyond the post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy paradigm that placed the government at the center of most counterterrorism work.” Instead of expecting the government to deal with terrorist threats, Rasmussen advocated for “a much wider, more expansive and inclusive ‘whole-of-society’ approach” that he said should encompass “state and local governments, but also the private sector (to include technology companies), civil society in the form of both individual voices and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia.”

The “whole-of-society” trope can be traced from its initial popularization in the context of CVE in 2014-2015 to its use as a censorship coordinating mechanism after the rise of Donald Trump initiated a panic over Russian disinformation, then as a call for increased social media clampdowns during COVID, to the present—where it functions as a generic slogan and coordinating mechanism of a party state, one originally built by Obama, and which now operates through the vehicle of the Democratic Party over which he presides.

What the various iterations of this “whole-of-society” approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and the right to free association, their embrace of social media surveillance, and their repeated failure to deliver results. Indeed even Rasmussen, while advocating the “whole-of-society” approach, acknowledges that it “promises to be in many ways more messy, more complicated, and more frustrating in terms of delivering outcomes.” In other words, one shouldn’t count on it working.

Not that such flaws are disqualifying. In the same way that a particular politician’s poor standing with voters does not seem to discourage the party from anointing them as long as they can be trusted to serve its interests, the “whole-of-society” strategy remains attractive regardless of its outcomes, because it extends the party’s authority over formerly independent centers of power.

***

Indeed, “whole of society” is a totalizing form of politics. As the name implies, it discards the traditional separation of powers and demands political participation from corporations, civic groups and other non-state actors. Mass surveillance is the backbone of the approach, but it also consolidates a new class of functionaries who all directly or indirectly work for the party’s interests. This is exactly how the party carried out its mass censorship during COVID and the 2020 election: by embedding government officials and party-aligned “experts” from the for-hire world of nonprofit activism, inside the social media platforms. The result, as I chronicled in an investigative essay last year, was the largest campaign of domestic mass surveillance and censorship in American history—often censoring true and time-sensitive information.

To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach in such efforts, the party requires an endless supply of causes—emergencies that party officers, with funding from the state, use as pretexts to demand ideological alignment across public and private sector institutions. These causes come in roughly two forms: the urgent existential crisis (examples include COVID and the much-hyped threat of Russian disinformation); and victim groups supposedly in need of the party’s protection.

This past month included one of each.

Many observers misunderstood the downfall of Joe Biden and his swift replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeing the switch made without voter participation they decried it as a coup. But that is a kind of category error that assumes an intact democratic process was subverted by outside forces. In reality, if Biden is still aware of anything, it is that the party-state system that just removed him from power is the same one that installed him in the first place.

Rather than a coup, Biden’s precipitous decline forced into public view a political maneuver that would ordinarily have been carried out behind closed doors. Nevertheless it was an orderly transfer of power with party bosses Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi firmly in control of the process. Try to imagine the GOP attempting a similar replacement of Donald Trump and see how quickly your mind fills with images of mass protests and open revolt by Trump supporters. Only the Democratic Party establishment could pull off such a move months before the election. How?

Because the Democrats have at their disposal that “whole-of-society” political machinery, which this week was operationalized in service of a new cause: Getting Harris elected in order to prevent the crisis of Russian-fascist-white supremacist-democracy killing barbarism that is Trump. This explains why prominent media outlets pivoted in unison to insist that Harris was never the White House border czar, despite their own coverage from 2021 referring to her as “border czar.” One such article in Axios blamed the Trump campaign and Republicans for falsely tagging Harris with the border czar title which the article alleged “she never actually had.” Hours later the article was forced to post an Orwellian correction stating that “Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a "border czar" in 2021.”

The tell here—the way you know the system today functions very differently from the one that you, if you’re over the age of 30, grew up with—is how fast things change, on a dime. “How Kamala Harris Took Command of the Democratic Party in 48 Hours,” The New York Times breathlessly panted yesterday morning. It is hopeful to imagine that it was Harris’ extraordinary grit and leadership, largely hidden until now, that enabled her to “take over the party” so swiftly, but the truth is less dramatic. The party was delivered to her because she was selected by its leaders to act as its figurehead. That real achievement belongs not to Harris, but to the party-state. The question you might have is how it managed to put up a new candidate for president in just a matter of weeks. The answer is that the party had repeated opportunities over the past 10 years to train its whole-of-society apparatus in the rapid coordination of mass events. This was the payoff.

The other Great Cause this month arrived on July 19th, when Vice President Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, introduced a proposal for new “anti-hate” legislation. After holding an “interfaith coalition building” meeting at the White House, Emhoff announced that the Biden administration would soon release a new plan for combating Islamophobia. The plan comes out of the same White House initiative launched last year to counter antisemitism that promised a “whole-of-society” effort including increased scrutiny of social media companies and calls to counter “disinformation and misinformation.”

Herding Jews into the whole of society embrace is a useful way to turn nominally Jewish institutions—which here includes the Anti-Defamation League, which advised and endorsed the administration’s “whole-of-society” national strategy—into controlled subsidiaries of the party, while wresting control over the “Jewish narrative.” Thus the constant need to invoke Islamophobia every time evidence of antisemitism is presented. By erasing Jewish particularity and conflating all kinds of bigotry in an indistinguishable beige of generic “hate,” the party shuts up demands that it actually do something about anti-Jewish violence—something that only racist Islamaphobes see as a specifically Jewish issue. At the same time it justifies expansive, blunt-force interventions into institutions across the entire society, since they are all supposedly equally susceptible to promoting hate and extremism if they are allowed to operate outside of the party-state’s surveillance apparatus.

Over and over again, the answer to the generic category of hate is increased regulation and censorship of social media. Under the auspices of coordinating between the corporate and civic sector, activist groups aligned with party interests are used to monitor powerful corporations, especially in the tech sector. Protecting Jews from hate, in other words, demands granting the party-state more power to reward allies and punish political opponents.

That is precisely why Tablet’s editors have warned American Jews to oppose laws and other political initiatives claiming to protect them from antisemitism by censoring hate speech. “In a world in which people with minority opinions are increasingly subject to the full force of ‘the whole of government’ or ‘the whole of society’ being brought against them by a narrow group of powerful people,” Tablet wrote, “we have an existential interest as a people in supporting free speech and constitutional rights for others—on the historically-sound principle that they will soon be coming for us.”

One can imagine a President Kamala Harris using the “whole-of-society” push to enact various equity initiatives, which she has championed in the past. But, equally, if Trump wins in November, the same tactic will be used to coordinate the “spontaneous” resistance movement of government groups, media outlets, and billionaire-funded nonprofits who carry out the functions of the party state. It is this party-state itself that is incompatible with democracy. And the “whole of society” is what it demands.