Politics & Power Quote by John Olver

Fear does a lot of work in this sentence, and it does it with the cool, managerial cadence of a policy brief. Olver isn’t painting a scene of chaos; he’s building a rationale. “Most extreme individuals and factions” narrows moral responsibility to the fringe, but it also quietly expands the target set: “factions” can mean militias, parties, clerical networks, diaspora funders. The phrase “in Islamic countries” is the tell. It’s a geographic label that slides easily into a civilizational one, inviting listeners to mentally staple “Islamic” to “terrorist” without having to say it outright.

The line’s core move is escalation. “Now more motivated than ever” implies a before-and-after, a catalytic event that changed the incentive structure for violence. In early-2000s American political speech, that “now” usually pointed to U.S. actions abroad (wars, occupation, sanctions, alliances) even when speakers avoided naming them. The subtext is transactional: policy produces backlash, and backlash increases risk at home. That framing can be sober realism or a political lever, depending on how it’s deployed.

Then comes the statistic-shaped punch without statistics: “the number of potential terrorists has greatly expanded.” “Potential” is elastic enough to cover everyone from trained operatives to angry teenagers with internet access. It’s a warning, but also a permission slip for broad security measures and open-ended conflict. The intent reads less like cultural panic than legislative persuasion: justify surveillance budgets, interventions, or “homeland” infrastructure by recasting terrorism as an expanding labor market, with America as the recruiter-in-chief.