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In its haste to cover up the truth, DOJ forgets the internet is forever [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-16
The Department of Justice tried to stealthily delete one of its own studies showing that most domestic terrorism is committed by right-wingers, apparently forgetting that, you know, it’s on the internet.
Some time after Sept. 12, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism,” a report from the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice, quietly disappeared from the DOJ’s website.
Well, yeah. Can’t have that thing hanging about right now, can we?
Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
Once it was clear that Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer could not be definitively identified as a long-time antifa trans terrorist funded by George Soros, the right had to shift tactics a bit. The incoherent motivations of the actual accused killer, Tyler Robinson, were brushed aside so that people like bloodthirsty skeletal-looking ghoul Stepher Miller could blame the dangerous left writ large.
So in true authoritarian Keystone Kops fashion, the DOJ decided to deep-six a report saying very definitively otherwise, hoping that no one notices.
You can see why they’d want to cover this one up, with conclusions like: “In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
Aw, come on. That only shows that the right committed roughly five times more attacks and took roughly six times more lives. A pittance, really. Just a rounding error.
The DOJ genuinely does not seem to have thought through the fact that people can still access the study through the Wayback Machine. Heck, that’s where Daily Kos got it from for a piece last week.
A white supremacist wears a helmet covered in Nazi symbols and the words, “Commie killer,” during the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
The Trump administration’s actions, as per usual, are complete buffoonery, but they’re not without precedent. One thing a regime needs to succeed is control over the flow of information. That’s a big part of what drives Trump’s ceaseless lawsuits against the mainstream media and the desire to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, which provides the media with a level of protection against attacks from people like Trump. See also Peter Thiel bankrolling the attack that put Gawker out of business.
But distributed, nonprofit entities can’t be as easily cowed with litigation because there’s no giant pile of corporate money to get at. So in those instances, the government is apparently going to step in to take care of that, with the House GOP launching a probe of Wikipedia editors just last month for alleged bias with, you guessed it, antisemitism as the hook.
That’s a fig leaf, and everyone knows it. Conservatives have been furious at Wikipedia for its resilience in the face of their propaganda efforts, like when Elon Musk spent the 2024 election launching highly visible attacks on the website for alleged “anti-conservative bias.”
The Wayback Machine has been preserving government pages like this disappeared study ever since Trump started decimating government websites, and it will continue to memorialize things like this—at least until Trump figures out a way to illegally shut it down.
But even that won’t make the study go away. It’s on the internet, so it’s forever.
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