Leadership Quote by Janet Napolitano

Power in Washington often arrives wearing the costume of plain speech, and Napolitano’s “Let me be very clear” is the tell. It’s not clarity so much as preemptive damage control: a rhetorical helmet lowered before the blows land. As DHS secretary in an era when “terrorism” was politically coded as foreign, Muslim, and imported, she’s trying to widen the aperture without triggering the reflexive backlash that widening it inevitably provokes.

The key move is the phrase “we don’t have the luxury.” That word choice is prosecutorial. It casts critics of broader counterterrorism focus as indulgent, as if insisting on one preferred villain is a kind of partisan leisure activity. In one stroke, she turns an argument about civil liberties, profiling, and political priorities into an argument about seriousness. If you object, you’re not defending rights; you’re wasting time.

Her balancing act is also visible in the symmetry: “whether foreign or homegrown,” “regardless of the ideology.” The parallel structure sounds neutral and high-minded, but it’s doing targeted work. “Homegrown” is an invitation to acknowledge right-wing and anti-government violence without naming it; “ideology” is a buffer against accusations that DHS is smearing any particular constituency. It’s bureaucratic universalism as political self-defense.

Contextually, this reads like a government official trying to thread a needle: expand the definition of threat while maintaining legitimacy. The subtext is simple: the next fight won’t be about extremism alone. It will be about who gets to define it.