Politics & Power Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s line is a scalpel aimed at a loophole that sounds technical but lands as moral indictment: we screen for acts, not affinities. The phrasing is doing political work. “Right now” injects urgency, implying negligence in the present tense. “American law” spreads responsibility across institutions, not just one agency or administration. Then comes the neat pivot: “terrorist activity” versus “terrorist sympathies.” It’s a contrast designed to make existing safeguards feel commonsensical yet dangerously incomplete.

The subtext is less about border policy than about the limits of liberal legalism. In American jurisprudence, suspicion of conduct is at least legible; sympathy is closer to thought, belief, association. Perle exploits that tension: if the state can’t reliably police hearts and minds without trampling civil liberties, he suggests, then the state is structurally unequipped for the kind of conflict he thinks we’re in. The quote nudges the audience toward accepting a broader security mandate, one that treats ideology as a precursor crime.

Context matters. As a prominent defense hawk in the post-9/11 era, Perle is speaking into a climate where fear was policy fuel and immigration became a proxy battlefield for defining “us” and “them.” “Aliens” is a cold, legalistic term that keeps empathy out of the frame; the human becomes a category. The line works because it converts an abstract constitutional dilemma into a tidy, alarming asymmetry: we’re tough on terrorists, soft on their admirers. The rhetorical trap is that it invites agreement before you’ve asked the harder question: how would a democracy prove “sympathies” without corrupting itself?