From Proud Boys and Antifa to Capitol insurgents, spy agencies, private contractors, platform giants, and courts — America keeps auditioning villains. Maybe the face we seek is the theater itself.
By InnerKwest Global Editorial | September 23, 2025
InnerKwest Global is an independent international investigative bureau covering politics, media power, and civic life.
The Stage
The lights are hot. The nation leans forward in a funhouse of mirrors, waiting for a villain to step into frame. On one side of the stage, militias and self-styled patriots posture for recognition. In the shadows, diffuse protest networks flicker like ghosts. Behind the curtain, powerful institutions — public and private — write the script, choose the lighting, and decide who is cast as “terrorist” and who will wear the laurels of savior.
The host clears his throat: “Ladies and gentlemen, will the real homegrown terrorist please stand up?”
The Contestants
Proud Boys. Once marketed as a fratish brand, they graduated into shock troops for a day of siege. Their leaders were tried and convicted for seditious conspiracy after January 6 — a sobering legal inventory of what happens when performative bravado becomes coordinated violence.
Antifa. Not an organization so much as a dispersed current: tactics, local collectives, and a political posture of antifascist resistance. It is legally and structurally slippery — precisely why it functions well as a political scapegoat. Call it up and you are rarely held to proving a central command.
Capitol Rioters. Citizens turned insurgents; flag-bearing pilgrims who believed history required them to act. For many, the aftermath was not mythic victory but indictments, jail time, and a country reexamining the terms “patriot” and “sedition.”
The pattern looks simple on the surface: organized far-right actors have repeatedly shown a capacity for lethal, coordinated action; loose left-leaning networks rarely meet the same threshold for organized violence. But facts are only the opening act in a larger show.
The Shadow Producers
If the contestants are actors onstage, the producers are the ones who shape what audiences believe.
CIA. A foreign-intelligence arm built to operate in darkness, its history of covert experiments and clandestine operations is a stain on the ideal of accountable governance. Secrecy that once served foreign policy can warp domestic trust when its practices leak into homegrown manipulation.
NSA. The invisible dragnet. Revelations in the last decade showed that metadata and bulk collection stretch into ordinary lives. The tool’s scale prompts a crucial question: when surveillance is normalized, who remains safe from being recast as suspect?
FBI. Once the emblem of institutional competence, now a political battlefield. Recent, highly charged congressional hearings — including a public exchange in which Senator Cory Booker challenged the FBI director and the director replied that he was “not going anywhere” — make plain that the Bureau can be seen as actor as much as arbiter. When enforcement becomes part of the spectacle, the line between policing and political theater blurs. YouTube
Erik Prince. The entrepreneurial purveyor of privatized force. He does not wave a flag so much as offer a business model: outsourced coercion packaged for governments and private interests. That calculus makes force fungible — and less subject to democratic accountability.
Palantir. The algorithmic stagehand. Its recent work with immigration agencies — notably a $30 million contract to develop an “ImmigrationOS” platform for ICE scheduled through 2027 — shows how surveillance software is being used to prioritize enforcement and deportation workflows. When algorithms pick who to flag, the human element of error, bias, and misclassification becomes a matter of life or liberty hidden in contract language. WIRED+1
Larry Ellison & Platform Power. The consolidation warning sign keeps arriving in real time. Reporting this week notes that Oracle founder Larry Ellison — newly prominent in major tech and media deals and now counted among investors with influence over a major social platform — joins a shrinking circle of ultra-wealthy owners whose corporate reach touches platforms billions use. Commentators have framed Ellison alongside figures such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as part of a new axis of private power that can shape algorithmic visibility and cultural narratives. These are not abstract dynamics: boardrooms and balance sheets now help determine what large swaths of the public see — and do not see. Boing Boing+1
The Audition Twist
Imagine a reality show:
The Proud Boys stride up, chests out, but video and federal filings reveal informants, provocateurs, and messy overlaps with undercover operations. Antifa never appears onstage, yet the shadow of “Antifa” is projected into every clip the producers want to run. Capitol rioters wave flags while replayed footage punctures their self-mythologies. The CIA drops dossiers from the wings. Palantir wheels in a glowing dashboard that promises to predict threats by the quarter. A contractor with a slide deck suggests, without shame, that domestic order can be optimized and monetized.
The audience applauds. Ratings spike. And the season continues.
What the Show Conceals
The inconvenient truth is not simply who picks up the megaphone; it’s who funds the megaphone and why it’s amplified. Analysts and government studies have repeatedly shown that right-wing extremist actors are responsible for a large share of lethal ideologically motivated violence in recent decades — a pattern whose visibility has fluctuated amid political pressure and shifting public databases. That trend matters because it contradicts the simple narratives some find convenient. The Guardian+1
Fear fuels an industry: think tanks, security consultancies, cable news, private intelligence, book tours, and campaign coffers. Fear attracts budgets, and budgets buy influence. The apparatus that keeps the show running profits from spectacle.
The Constitutional Accomplices
If shows have judges, ours has become a judiciary and a set of institutions that, intentionally or not, validate an authoritarian drift.
SCOTUS no longer reads merely as referee in the public square; in a series of rulings that tighten executive control, narrow voting access, expand immunities, or reinterpret long-standing checks, the Court can — whether by design or consequence — act as a consolidator of power. Decisions that chip away at franchise or limit remedies against state overreach are not abstract legalisms; they are concrete shifts in who governs, and how accountable governors remain.
Call it the Benedict Arnold effect: betrayal from within, cloaked in robes and jurisprudential gravitas. When a court repeatedly tilts toward power that reduces democratic friction — when constitutional interpretation becomes architecture for concentration — the republic is made fragile not by mobs at its gates but by guardians who loosen the bolts on the doors.
They are not alone. Administrative accomplices — agency heads who look the other way, legislators who enable, platform gatekeepers that amplify rage — all play parts in the orchestra pit. The liturgy of power is performed not only on the stage but in briefing rooms and executive suites where rules are rewritten to normalize exceptionalism.
Real-time: When Hatred Dresses Itself in Christian Liturgy
GLENDALE, Ariz. September 21, 2025 — Thousands of people came to Glendale to attend a memorial service at State Farm Stadium for conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Something is amiss when, on a weekend in America, a preacher or self-anointed prophet fills a stadium and asks a crowd to “worship” a hate martyr — not to honor, not to grieve, but to worship. The vocabulary matters. When violence attains the language of liturgy, it leaves politics and enters religion.
This is the civic corrosion of authoritarianism: when grievance becomes sacrament, when conspiratorial leaders become saints, whole communities gather for rituals of resentment. Stadiums are converted into cathedrals of division. The rites — chants, relics, martyrs — produce social cohesion around an ideology of grievance. Once sanctified, hate is no longer an argument to be debated; it becomes a creed.
These services do not appear ex nihilo. They are fed by silence — official nods, judicial rationales that protect power, media ecosystems that amplify spectacle — and by marketplaces eager to monetize loyalty and outrage.
The Mirror
At the climax, a giant mirror descends over the stage. The audience leans in — and sees themselves.
The host’s whisper is not a punchline: “The real homegrown terrorist is the theater that keeps producing them. Are you spectator, participant, or profiteer?”
The harder truth is that terrorism, defined as political violence intended to intimidate or coerce, is not merely an attribute of fringe actors. It is an emergent property of systems: media economies that feed on fear, partisan statecraft that weaponizes institutions, surveillance architectures that normalize exceptional powers, and private interests that sell coercion as a service. When these forces cohere, they manufacture conditions that produce violence and then profit from the fallout.
What a Moral Response Might Look Like
If we are to be honest and effective, the response must be systemic and structural:
- Rebuild transparent data. Restore and protect neutral repositories for tracking extremist violence and online radicalization. Accurate, available data is the best inoculation against politicized narratives.
- Reclaim democratic oversight. End the informal privatization of force. Contracts that place coercive instruments outside meaningful public scrutiny must be subject to full congressional review and public auditing.
- Enforce surveillance guardrails. Surveillance powers must be constrained by law, equipped with independent oversight, and coupled to effective redress mechanisms to prevent chilling of civic life.
- Distinguish dissent from violence. Preserve robust space for protest. A democratic society can tolerate — even require — uncomfortable speech; it must not confuse that speech with conspiratorial violence.
- Hold institutions accountable. Courts, agencies, and platforms must be evaluated not only on doctrine and performance but on their effect on civic health. When guardians facilitate authoritarian drift, remedies must be structural as well as personnel.
- Civic education & media literacy. Train citizens to spot spectacle, interrogate emotional narratives, and understand how political theater is monetized. A literate citizenry is the best defense against manufactured martyrs.
The Last Act: A Choice
This is more than theory. These are revelations in motion: stadium worship services turned political incubators, intelligence and surveillance architectures folded into domestic governance, private contractors pitching coercion as a product, platform power consolidating in a few hands, and a judiciary that sometimes reads law in ways that enlarge unchecked authority.
We can prosecute militants, deplatform agitators, grill the directors, and investigate contracts — and we should. But if we never confront the ecology that produces and profits from terror, the show simply runs another season. The question at the end of every act will remain the same: who is the homegrown terrorist?
If we want an honest answer, we must stop searching only for those who step into the frame and start examining who built the frame, who sold the tickets, and who keeps the lights burning late into the night.
To end the show, we must stop buying tickets.
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Sources
- Coverage of FBI Senate/Judiciary hearing and exchange with Senator Cory Booker and FBI leadership — [AP / Reuters / C-span session].
- Palantir — ICE “ImmigrationOS” contract reporting (Wired; reporting on contract value and timing).
- Reporting/analysis on Palantir contracts and surveillance implications (Wired, American Immigration Council).
- Coverage of Larry Ellison / Oracle platform-power reporting (Reuters / The Guardian / Business Insider).
- Government and independent analyses on right-wing domestic extremist violence trends and data changes. (DOJ / think-tank reporting).