KOCHISM + PALEOCONSERVATISM = TERRORISM?

Two National Guard troops were shot in D.C. yesterday, reportedly by an Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal. He'd worked with Americans during the Afghan War and was let into the U.S. in 2021, after the fall of Kabul. Republicans have long criticized the Biden-era program that vetted Lakanwal, but both CNN and ABC are reporting that the Trump administration granted asylum to Lakanwal in April of this year.

Josh Marshall says:

With DC shooter now identified as an Afghan national not the antifa secret agent White House hoped for a good time to remember the Trump admin has gutted domestic anti-terrorism capacity and reassigned many to finding grandmothers to arrest at immigration hearings.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) November 26, 2025 at 11:06 PM

This a point also made by former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, now a Trump critic:

Maybe the admin should reverse its decision to de-prioritize counter terrorism in favor of deportations

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— Adam Kinzinger (@adamkinzinger.substack.com) November 26, 2025 at 10:15 PM

Kinzinger says:

So in this terrible shooting of these Guard members today, one of the least surprising development[s] was the immediate jump to blame the left -- one person calling for deploying the military against the left -- and what we find out is it was actually an Afghan national that actually was granted his asylum under Trump, but I don't blame Trump for this. But the reality is, the FBI has pulled, and all of the defense security establishment has pulled, all of their focus on anti-terrorism and put it on the deportation. I'm just going to say that: a terrorist attack, and for the last year, the defense establishment and the FBI have pivoted from anti-terrorism to deportation. Use that for what you will.

Clearly, there's blame to go around. You might hear about a Justice Department inspector general's report from this past summer stating that 55 Afghan nationals let in under the Biden-era Afghan refugee program were found to be on terror watch lists. But please note that Trump Justice Department concluded that vetting and monitoring of these individuals continued, to the apparent satisfaction of the current team at DOJ:

After investigations, the FBI eventually removed 46 evacuees from the watchlist, determining that they posed no threat to the homeland.

However, nine remained in the terror database as of July 2024 and eight were in the US....

Despite the 55 individuals flagged, the DOJ inspector general determined that overall “each of the responsible elements of the FBI effectively communicated and addressed any potential national security risks identified.”

I'm not ready to jump to A.R. Moxon's conclusion:

Republicans are purposely and strategically incompetent on antiterror; they hope for violent attacks they can frame as terrorist, to justify accelerating the terrorist violence they’re already enacting against the US civilian population.

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— A.R. Moxon (@juliusgoat.bsky.social) November 27, 2025 at 7:23 AM

But I think Republicans have less motivation to be diligent on terrorism. They know that the George W. Bush administration missed the 9/11 warning signs, then had stratospherically high approval ratings in the aftermath of the attack.

Also, Republicans are reluctant to use government to solve problems that don't affect them personally and don't affect people they care about (mostly their rich donors). That's an Ayn Rand/Koch brothers approach to government. They don't really want to preserve government social programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, because they don't need them. They assume they can pay to shield themselves from consumer fraud. They're certain they can afford to live far from environmentally contaminated areas, and can relocate to dodge the effects of climate change. The schools their kids attend don't seem to have much gun violence.

They'll police social behavior -- banning abortions, cracking down on LGBTQ people -- because doing so wins them votes. They're pro-gun because their voters love guns. After 9/11, they focused on jihadist threats here and abroad because it was good politics, and because neo-imperialists gained the upper hand in their party.

But now the dominant strain of the Republican Party is "America First" (with an asterisk indicating that military adventurism aimed at Latin America is cool). They've lost interest in protecting Americans from terrorism. Why bother? They have good security, and so do their rich friends.

That's why the Trump administration doesn't seem to be trying very hard to prevent attacks of the kind we saw yesterday. The Trumpers are obsessed with native-born left and centrist critics -- "the enemy from within," they call us -- and with immigrants from Latin America. They don't seem to care about other dangers. And that may at least partly explain why yesterday's attack happened.