Last week, as you may have heard, the Justice Department breathlessly announced that it had uncovered and broken up a terrorist plot against the government, leading to the arrest of a 20 year-old man, Christopher Lee Cornell, in Ohio. According to the FBI, Cornell was planning to go to the US Capitol and kill government officials. As often happens with these kinds of announcements, the press was quick to jump in and fuel the narrative of some big terror plot that the FBI was able to miraculously disrupt at the last minute.
For years now, we’ve pointed out a pattern of how nearly every big headline about the US disrupting a domestic terrorist attack was almost always about the FBI creating its very own plot, and then pressuring and cajoling some vulnerable, poverty-stricken, desperate Muslim (almost always Muslim) young men into “joining” this plot. This happens despite those individuals rarely having expressed direct interest in any sort of terrorist activity, or having any connections or means to carry out such activity. But with continued pressure from “FBI informants” (who tend to either by paid by the FBI or are trying to reduce punishment for other crimes they’ve been charged with — or both), eventually these men agree to take part in a “plot” that was entirely designed by the FBI and had no chance of ever happening.