You Are the Bad Guy
1st July 2021
There is a moment in nearly all post-9/11 thrillers that anyone of a certain generation will be familiar with. It’s the point in the third act of a TV series like 24 or Homeland, or the last mission of video game franchises like Call of Duty,where the whole conspiracy has finally unraveled and the true villain is revealed. And he (it is always a he) turns out to be not an Arab jihadist, or a Russian ultranationalist, but a self-styled American patriot.
These reveals, intended to be shocking, always came off a bit contrived. For a population which experienced an unprecedented terrorist attack within recent memory, it was like living through a real-life version of The Exorcist, only to have the televisual tastemakers divulge that Linda Blair’s character was actually Old Man Withers all along.
One cannot help but get the same sense from the Biden Administration’s recently revealed National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. We have seen this one before and the whole thing comes off…a little formulaic.