Going to Extremes: As Our Domestic Cancer Spreads, America Flails

Jeff Robbins on Jan 6, 2026

Five years to the week since the extremism-fueled, extremist-led Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol and with plentiful documentation of the metastasizing threat from extremism from both Right and Left, Farah Pandith could be forgiven for feeling that her life's work combating hate is hopeless.

She doesn't.

The Kashmiri-born veteran American diplomat has spent some 20 years trying to fight extremism. When she started that work during former President George W. Bush's administration, it was plain that extremism threatened our national security. In the last ten years, however, it has become equally plain that it also threatens American democracy.

Educated at Smith College, Pandith went on to obtain a degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy. She became a relative rarity: a political appointee asked to join both Republican and Democratic administrations. She was first hired to serve on Bush's National Security Council. Then, when incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to a briefing before taking office in 2009, Pandith so impressed Clinton that the latter appointed her the first-ever U.S. Special Representative to Muslim Communities. Eight years after we were attacked by Islamist jihadists on Sept. 11, 2001, Pandith's principal mission was devising ways for us to reduce radicalized Islam abroad. Her book, "How We Win," was written as a playbook for confronting that problem.

Now, of course, we have an additional problem, a huge one: domestic extremism from both sides, with gasoline poured on the already raging fire by hate mongers armed with social media platforms powered by algorithms. We are, in fact, in DefCon 1, and Pandith is one of those trying to jolt Americans out of our torpor about it.

By early 2024, the U.S. Government Accounting Office reported that a hate crime was committed in America roughly once an hour. The Justice Department estimates that one-third of all internet users personally experienced hate speech on the internet. And the link between hate speech and hate crimes seems unassailable. "We have a level of polarization in the U.S. that's an important factor," says Seamus Hughes of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska. "The online environment has algorithms that are set up to make you angry. And all that is playing into a perfect storm of factors that are leading to an increase in radicalization."

Then there's the malign influence of President Donald Trump, who since 2015 -- from within the White House and from without -- has stoked rage at every opportunity, all day, seven days a week and often all night.

Pandith is furious at the social media companies that directly spawn the hatred and profit handsomely from it. She is also incredulous that Americans don't demand protections for children against the ugliness, the misinformation and the disinformation of the kind that other countries are imposing. "When you look at human brains that are not fully formed until the age of 24," she says, "it is incumbent upon adults to do the smart thing. We do it with alcohol. We do it with driving. We do it with other forms of social harm. The idea that we do not have a policy in place to protect American kids is outrageous."

A good start, Pandith says, is finally holding accountable social media companies whose non-response responses to our national crisis she calls "pathetic." "Having been in government," says Pandith, "working on fighting extremism, and listening to Silicon Valley executives come into government and be untruthful, and spinning and spinning the reality of what's happening, and promising government officials that they are doing all that is possible to protect American kids," infuriates her, and she says Americans need to get infuriated.

Her view is that there has been "a deep change in the state of hate," which she associates with "the acceleration of rage." And it is inextricably connected to the ongoing erosion of democratic norms and the real danger to the continued existence of the America we've known. "If you are lazy on hate, you're going to be lazy on democracy," she says.

Asked if she feels discouraged by the extremism tsunami in her adopted country, Pandith says no. "If we looked at things that's way," she says, "we'd never accomplish anything."

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.