New Jersey’s homeland security office is out with a new threat analysis, Save Jerseyans, and there aren’t too many surprises in the document. One item did catch my eye.
“Within the assessment, NJOHSP stated that domestic extremists, foreign terrorist organizations, and nationstate actors would attempt to hinder economic recovery and vaccination efforts, fuel anti-government sentiment, and spread false narratives through the use of disinformation,” the state agency explained in its March 2021 analysis, referring back to a supplemental assessment from September. “Through the Internet and social media, threat actors learned to leverage online conspiracy theories to thrive and expand their individual movements to mainstream platforms, which allowed for a wider range of recruitment.”
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Perhaps uncoincidentally, the analysis dropped within days of an excited New York Times piece on “far-right extremists” undermining vaccinations.
“Apocalyptic warnings about the vaccine feed into the far-right narrative that the government cannot be trusted, the sentiment also at the root of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot,” wrote Neil MacFarquhar. “The more vaccine opponents succeed in preventing or at least delaying herd immunity, experts noted, the longer it will take for life to return to normal and that will further undermine faith in the government and its institutions.”
[Sidenote: regular readers know that I am very much pro-vaccine. I’ve been vaccinated. I support vaccinations, though I don’t support a “mandate” particularly for an emergency use drug.]
Here’s the problem with the theory that this is a far-right problem: COVID-19 vaccine confidence issues were first brought into the mainstream conversation by none other than Kamala Harris who repeatedly declared that she wouldn’t trust a vaccine developed on Trump’s watch during the 2020 campaign.
Is Kamala Harris a far-right extremist?
Of course not. She’s an extremist for sure, but not one of the ideological right.
New Jersey’s own homeland security office notes that the state has monitored “a wide range of ideologically motivated extremists.”
“Essentially, it doesn’t matter if you are conservative or liberal; the more political someone is, the more likely he or she is to think that vaccines are unsafe,” wrote SUNY Associate Professor back in a 2017 essay. “Yet it is only the very conservative that are more likely to believe that vaccination should be a parent’s choice.” And I think we can all agree that believing in parental choice doesn’t make someone a “domestic extremist.”
There are bad people of all stripes out there in the dark spaces of the Internet, Save Jerseyans. It’s unfortunate to see so many folks in positions of influence and authority falling into the same old partisan trap when the challenges facing our country are, in reality, much more complicated than they’d like you to believe.
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