At 11 AM Eastern today, unlawfully appointed Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf will deliver the 2020 “State of the Homeland Address” (watch the livestream here).
Will he admit what DHS’s apolitical experts have recently assessed, that white supremacist-linked domestic terrorism is the biggest security threat facing America? Or, as we suspect, will Wolf instead deliver a speech that advances the Trump re-election campaign’s preferred narrative that stokes inaccurate and ugly fears over Black and Brown immigrants and urban protesters?
As Betsy Woodruff Swan noted for Politico, DHS’ own experts are highlighting that white supremacists are the deadliest top priority threat:
White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security. Two later draft versions of the same document — all of which were reviewed by POLITICO — describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language. But all three drafts describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.
However, we have been noting that Wolf and DHS have been acting as a mouthpiece and propaganda arm of Trump’s re-election (see our assessment here in the aftermath of the Border Patrol release of a lurid, racist, and inaccurate propaganda video that cast Latino immigrants as killers).
According to Douglas Rivlin, Director of Communication for America’s Voice:
At today’s speech, will Chad Wolf acknowledge the reality that white nationalist right-wing terrorism is the biggest homeland security threat? Or, as we suspect, will he try and further the inaccurate campaign narrative of Donald Trump, that Black and Brown immigrants and protesters are our gravest threat? Taxpayers pay for DHS, and its peddling of shockingly ugly and inaccurate propaganda, which cries out for congressional oversight, investigation and accountability. The federal government is supposed to work for the public, not for a divisive, authoritarian re-election campaign. They are supposed to improve security not threaten it.
We’ll be watching to see if Wolf speaks the truth or spouts propaganda.
