Washington state holds first meeting of ‘public health’ task force to address ‘Domestic Violent Extremism’

Washington State has launched a “Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force” to create a “public health” approach for addressing “extremism and mass violence.”

The effort is led by the state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office, which was given $247,000 in Washington’s 2024 budget to create the task force from Washington State Senate Bill 5950. Ferguson, a Democrat, who the Seattle Times called “petty, pushy and overly ambitious,” recently won the election to become the state’s next governor.

HB 1333 was passed in response to a 2022 report on domestic terrorism from Ferguson’s office. That report omitted groups like Antifa and BLM that seized control of 6 blocks of Seattle in 2020 for the deadly Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The report recommended creating a commission to respond to “domestic violent extremism” (DVE) using a public health model.

The report is similar to President Joe Biden’s 2021 “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which claimed that “narratives of fraud” and “conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic” would result in violence.

The money is for the 2025 fiscal year and instructs the AG’s office (AGO) to work with Washington’s embattled Department of Health to appoint at least ten people to the task force. Thirty-one people were appointed by the AGO including two people from the Polarization & Extremism Research Innovation Lab from Chicago, IL (PERIL). One of the representatives appointed to the task force is Rabbi Seth Limmer, who was investigated for creating a hostile workplace at his Reform synagogue and eventually resigned.

The other PERIL member is author Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who lectures on hate speech and “far-right extremism.” The group claimed during the first meeting of the task force that they had been “contracted” for the task force, leaving Washington taxpayers paying for their “services.”

Members of the task force are supposed to include community organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union, law enforcement groups such as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and “public health and nonprofit organizations.”

However, according to Clark County Today, the ACLU representative was removed via a committee amendment with no explanation given. Despite the 2020 BLM riots that rocked Seattle, the task force did include Black Lives Matter King County Seattle’s Executive Director, Katrina Johnson. BLM Seattle-King County states its mission is “to dismantle anti-black systems, policies, and outcomes that lead to the oppression, torture, and death of black and brown people.”

BLM’s guiding principles include the dismantling of the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in “justice” work, disrupting “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

During the task force’s first meeting on Friday, some of the members mentioned how important they believed the group’s efforts were given the recent election of Donald Trump.

A woman testified during the public comment period that during the occupation of the University of Washington by Hamas supporters, all of their actions targeting Jews on campus went unpunished. "When folks set up an unauthorized encampment on a university campus, block pedestrian traffic, harass and effectively discriminate against Jewish students in graffiti, hate on public property, and then, instead of being penalized, they are rewarded with concessions from the university that incentivizes bad behavior."

The eight people who were allowed to give public comment were all concerned about the task force and its mission, as well as the four people whose written comments were read aloud during the meeting. 

The task force will send a preliminary report to the governor and certain legislative committees by June and is scheduled to have a “final report” by December 2026, which is supposed to include recommendations for creating a “comprehensive framework.”

The task force is supposed to focus on the roots of “radicalization,” address its impacts and deradicalizing “extremist groups.”

According to Washington’s 2022 Domestic Terrorism study, “Secondary prevention refers to efforts to mitigate the impacts of already radicalized people and groups, primarily through surveillance, monitoring, arrest, interruption of plots, barricading of doors, hardening of soft targets, etc.”

In January, the task force is also rolling out a “hate crime hotline” in three counties, which has been widely criticized as a “snitch line” for residents to report people they disagree with.