It’s always better to know exactly who the enemy is, because then you know exactly who and what you are fighting against. As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

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This cannot be said enough: The truth is that Antifa activists were not the ones inciting violence and mayhem during the social justice protests or at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Far-right extremists and white nationalist groups were. We cannot allow anyone to ever take the heat off these groups. They are incredibly dangerous and destructive to this nation, not just in terms of violent physical threats, but because of the division and hate they fuel.

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At the risk of sounding super annoying, there is this thing called the Theory of Constraints.  Essentially, the Theory of Constraints says that it’s critical to first identity the factors (i.e., constraints) that keep us from achieving an objective, then systematically remove or improve those constraints until they no longer limit us from achieving that goal. It’s important to keep in mind that if we identify the wrong constraint and work on that instead of the actual constraint, we could likely make the entire situation worse.

 

Take Jack, for instance. Jack owns a car dealership and sells lots and lots of cars, but he never seems to have enough money to pay his bills at the end of the month. The only thing he can think of is that he must not be selling enough cars. He needs to sell even more!! So, Jack orders twice the number of cars as usual from his wholesale car suppliers and announces a contest among his salespeople to motivate them to sell every single one of them. Jack’s salespeople do great! They sell every car on the lot!! However, in the weeks following the contest, Jack had even less money in the bank than he did before.

 

What Jack failed to realize is that he identified the wrong constraint. The problem was never that Jack was selling too few cars.  The problem was that he had to pay his wholesale car suppliers for the cars before he actually sold them to his customers. In other words, the terms of Jack’s Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable were not aligned correctly, and that was the constraint. Since Jack’s problem was cash flow, it was made far worse when he ordered even more cars because now, he owed even more money upfront.

 

​The Theory of Constraints can be instructive in many areas of public policy, but it’s especially important in this discussion because we’re not talking about cars, we’re talking about what could be life and death. We cannot allow anyone to highjack the domestic terrorism debate or try to gaslight us into misidentifying the real problem.  If we do, January 6th will be just the beginning of our troubles.

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This is not the first time far-right extremist groups have been protected by a misidentified constraint. For decades, the government and law enforcement agencies didn’t give the rising threat of these groups the attention it demanded, focusing instead on Islamic extremists.

 

… and then people exploited it. For example, in a 2017 interview, British-Hungarian-American hard-right radio personality turned White House Deputy Assistant to President Trump Sebastian Gorka, said there “had never been a serious attack or a serious plot (in the United States) that was unconnected from ISIS or al-Qaeda.”

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When, in response, someone cited the Oklahoma City bombing – where Timothy McVeigh, a white man, killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, a horrific crime that remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history – Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.” His wife Katharine then chimed in and said that the threat of domestic terrorism would be solved if the United States simply closed “radical mosques” and barred Al Jazeera from broadcasting.

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This is gaslighting at its finest. In truth, analysis by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University for the timeframe 2001-2020 found that “the number of fatalities caused by acts of violent extremism by Muslim-Americans in 19 years was about the same as the number of murders that took place every three days in the United States.”

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Between 2021 and 2023, the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism “tracked only six Islamist-related terror incidents in the U.S., compared to 30 incidents with far-right perpetrators within that same timeframe. During these years, U.S. authorities still regularly made arrests linked to Islamist extremism, but most of these involved people providing material support, such as money, to terrorist groups abroad, or attempting to travel outside the U.S. to join such groups.” The next year, they reported that “all the extremist-related murders in 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, with eight of the 13 killings involving white supremacists and the remaining five having connections to far-right anti-government extremists.”

 

In a September 11, 2025 report, Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, found that, since January 1, 2020, terrorist attacks accounted for about 0.07 percent of all homicides on U.S. soil: “Right-wing terrorists accounted for over half of those murders, Islamists for 21 percent, left-wingers for 22 percent, and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations.”

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< The percentage of murders committed by Islamist extremists jumped considerably between 2024 and the beginning of 2025 because of the deadly vehicular terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025, an attack that killed fourteen people. This was the first mass killing incident by an Islamist extremist since an attack that killed eight people with a truck on a bike path in Manhattan on Halloween 2017. >

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It’s important we keep an eye on this narrative, because Sebastian Gorka and his hardcore views are back on the scene. He is now Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the Trump/Vance Administration’s National Security Council. When announcing Gorka’s new appointment, Donald Trump described him as a “tireless advocate for the America First Agenda and the MAGA Movement.” 

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Just so you know, Sebastian showed up to President Trump’s first inaugural ball wearing the honorary medal of Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian nationalist organization that the U.S. State Department listed as a group of “organizations under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany” during World War II. He denies ever being a member of the group and that he only wears the medal to honor his late father, but NBC News traveled to Hungary to investigate the matter and spoke to several members who proudly reported that Gorka was a well-known member of the group.

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Andras Heisler, the Hungarian vice-president of the New York-based World Jewish Congress, told the journalists that wearing the medal wasn’t “a good message for a democratic society” because members of Vitezi Rend were “likely complicit in the murder of some of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews toward the end of World War II.”

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The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, an American civil-rights group, put it less delicately: “How many ducks in the Trump White House must walk, talk and quack antisemitically before our country wakes up and sees the greater problem? Who among us wears a medal of a Nazi-sympathetic organization to remember loved ones?”

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Trying to protect far-right extremist groups by randomly throwing out baseless claims about ISIS or al-Qaeda is just one angle these guys try. Throughout the years, many courageous people tried hard to raise the alarm regarding these groups, but their efforts were at best ignored and at worst sabotaged.

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In 2009 – during the Obama administration – Daryl Johnson, a senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wrote a private intelligence report specifically for members of law enforcement. However, conservative media outlets leaked Johnson’s report, causing a huge uproar because Johnson dared to use the term “right-wing extremism.” His report also warned that American military veterans could be prime targets for domestic extremist recruitment. Republicans went berserk, demanding an apology on behalf of veterans and demanding Johnson be fired. Following the firestorm, then DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized for elements of the report, then withdrew it altogether. Within a year, Johnson’s entire department was dismantled and work on the threat of domestic terrorism came to a screeching halt.

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Toward the end of the Obama administration, however, the Department of Homeland Security awarded grants to groups that countered violent extremism – like those that helped people who wanted to leave neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups or tried to prevent Americans from embracing these groups in the first place. But at the very beginning of the first Trump administration those grants were cancelled.

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As a result of years of turning a blind eye, white supremacy – as terrorism scholar John Horgan, a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University put it – became “far more dispersed and deeply ingrained ideology in Western society.” Over the long-term, he fears “it will be far harder to defeat than jihadism.”