What Is Daniel Goldman Talking About?

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

 

New York congressman Daniel Goldman exemplified his party’s self-professed respect for the sanctity of the Fourth Estate during a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, when he tore into the credibility of a journalist he apparently doesn’t like, mangling the facts he brought to bear in the process.

 

Goldman seemed to reject the premise of the Republican-led hearing provocatively titled “Mostly Peaceful: Countering Left-Wing Organized Violence.” Devoted to the relative threat posed by domestic political extremists, it fast devolved into a childish exercise in which lawmakers competed to more loudly insist that their ideological opponents represented the most urgent terroristic threat.

 

Republicans bolstered their arguments by citing the unprecedented destruction wrought during the 2020 riots. They added that mob efforts to stifle and intimidate critics of left-wing causes — like the ordeal endured by University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines — suggest this threat persists. Democrats countered by citing FBI statistics indicating that violent white nationalism presents an even graver danger. Why either party would implicitly take ownership of either of these two blights on American society with their manic subject-changing is beyond me. But both sides came prepared with their preferred set of unimpeachable facts. Mostly. The same cannot be said of Representative Goldman.

 

Goldman pivoted to one of the witnesses, Townhall senior writer Julio Rosas, apparently to impugn his credibility ahead of his testimony on his experiences on the ground during the 2020 riots.

 

Goldman mocked Rosas as “apparently the expert now in organized terrorist activity” and alleged that the reporter had “overruled the FBI director who says — there’s a headline — ‘antifa’s an ideology, not an organization.’” He condescended further: “No, no, no. Let’s not listen to the FBI director. Let’s listen to — sorry, what’s your title? — senior writer at Townhall, who is going to tell us that the FBI director is wrong.” Despite appearances to the contrary, that was not an introduction. “There’s no question,” Goldman barked when Rosas mistook the assault on his integrity as an opportunity to correct the record.

 

Advertently or otherwise, Goldman has misrepresented FBI director Christopher Wray’s comments about antifa amid his flurry of invective. “It’s not a group or an organization,” Wray told members of Congress in September 2020 of the amalgam comprised of “violent anarchist extremists” some of whom “identify” with antifa. “It’s a movement or an ideology.” That was not meant to be a source of comfort.

 

The FBI is not in the business of policing ideologies (or, at least, it shouldn’t be, recent scandalous revelations to the contrary notwithstanding). Antifa isn’t an “organization” in the sense that it has finances that can be tracked and frozen, leaders that can be monitored or co-opted, and structures that can be infiltrated and disrupted. It is a violent idea in the ether, which renders its menace not less but more threatening because so many of the avenues that might allow proactive policing of this loose affiliation are legally closed off.

 

The existence of violent left-wing ideologues does not, of course, defang violent right-wing ideologues or undermine law enforcement’s contention that radical white nationalism represents a significant domestic terror threat. That wasn’t this hearing’s purpose. It’s entirely unclear what Goldman hoped to achieve by misrepresenting the FBI director’s comments and dismissing the threat posed by nebulous left-wing militancy, and all in the botched effort to malign a journalist whose record speaks for itself. Whatever he set out to do, he failed.