The terrorism we fought abroad has come home, with domestic perpetrators stoking violence.

The American version of the 21st century, marked by our government’s devastating decision to respond to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks with a Global War on Terror – first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and then in other countries across the Middle East – has had its grim effects at home as well. It’s caused us to turn on one another in confusing ways. After all, terror isn’t a place or a people.

In the early 2010s, our multitrillion-dollar wars were then in full swing. At home, the names of young Blacks killed by our police forces, ever more ominously armed off the country’s battlefields, were just seeping into wider public consciousness as was a right-wing political backlash against prosecutions of the police. Anti-government extremist militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, some of whom would storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to violently block the certification of an elected president, were already seething about the supposed executive overreach of the Obama administration and that Black president’s alleged foreign birth. Back then, those guys all seemed very much a part of America’s fringe.

Back then, I also didn’t imagine that men in uniform would emerge as a central part of the leadership and membership of such extremist groups. Sadly, they did. As journalist Peter Maass pointed out, of the 897 individuals indicted so far for their involvement in the Jan. 6 violence, 118 had backgrounds in the U.S. military and some had fought in this country’s war on terror abroad. Nearly 30 police officers from a dozen different departments around the country attended the rally; a number of them have faced criminal charges.

It is worth remembering that the military and the police are not monoliths. They aren’t “blue lives” or “the troops,” but individuals. Were Americans – all of us from all walks of life – more willing to stand up to bigotry and extremism, we might still help change what’s happening here for the better.

What also sends chills down my spine is that federal law enforcement agencies turned their backs on the warning signs of all this. Had the FBI acted on information that extremist groups were planning violence on Jan. 6, it might not have happened.

Expenditures for the Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11, totaled more than $1 trillion from 2002 through 2020, more than six times expenditures for similar activities at various government agencies during the previous 20 years.

Yet DHS seems susceptible to ignoring real threats. Of the approximately 450 politically motivated violent attacks taking place on our soil in the past decade, the majority were perpetrated by homegrown far-right extremists. Meanwhile, DHS has largely remained focused on foreign terrorist groups – and homegrown jihadist groups inspired by them – as the main threats to this country.

ANDREA MAZZARINO cofounded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She is an activist, social worker and author. This article originally appeared at tomdispatch.com