The scripted violence scenario represented by Christopher Hasson, the 49-year-old Coast Guard lieutenant arrested last week and charged with plotting a massive domestic terrorist attack on leading media and Democratic Party figures, is the stuff of national nightmares.
But the nightmare is hardly over. Even more frightening is the realization that Hasson likely is just one of many radicalized white men poised to take violent action on “a scale rarely seen.”
Certainly Hasson’s plans were remarkably wide-reaching. Inspired in large part by Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik—and in particular by Breivik’s ardent belief in the white-nationalist hoax theory called “cultural Marxism”—Hasson wrote: “I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on earth.”
Foremost among his targets were leading media and Democratic Party figures, including MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Ari Melber, and Chris Hayes, CNN’s Van Jones and Don Lemon, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker.
To carry out these assassinations, Hasson had amassed an armory in his basement, including 15 weapons and 1,000 rounds of ammunition. In his deleted emails, investigators found Hasson musing about carrying out a “two-pronged attack” using bioterror weapons and a sniper attack.
He also was an ardent white nationalist. In addition to his admiration for Breivik, Hasson corresponded with other neo-Nazis. He was particularly keen on the work of white supremacist Harold Covington, who promoted creating a “white homeland” in the Pacific Northwest, but who died in 2018.
“How long can we hold out there and prevent niggerization of the Northwest until whites wake up on their own or are forcibly made to make a decision whether to roll over and die or wake up on their own remains to be seen,” Hasson wrote Covington in a 2017 draft letter.
However, when Hasson was first arrested on Feb. 14, it was on mundane drug and weapons charges, and hardly merited a blip on anyone’s radar. Hasson was caught because he had been buying the addictive painkiller Tramadol from a drug dealer while stationed at U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Baltimore.
Those circumstances underscore the haphazard nature of American law enforcement’s handling of far-right domestic terrorism: Hasson wasn’t caught because investigators were seeking neo-Nazis within the ranks of the military—which is indeed a serious and ongoing issue, but one which very few resources are directed to addressing—but simply by fortunate happenstance.
The more disturbing aspect of this reality is the extraordinarily high likelihood that there remains on the American landscape a substantial number of radicalized white supremacists, capable and poised to inflict extraordinary harm well beyond their actual numbers, as with all domestic terrorists.
Certainly, Hasson’s is in fact only the latest case reflecting a remarkable surge in far-right domestic terrorism, particularly violence committed by white men who have been radicalized online. "Online radicalization seems to be speeding up, with young men, particularly white men, diving into extremist ideologies quicker and quicker," says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
Most of our focus on online radicalization has been directed toward radical Islamists such as Islamic State. Some experts have noted that the radicalization process for ISIS radicals is remarkably similar to that of neo-Nazis, in no small part because they share so many core values: ethnic nationalism, an embrace of violence, a loathing for Western liberal democracy, and a powerful preference for authoritarianism.
“After decades of being silenced, white nationalists could suddenly organize into significant audiences, sometimes as many as tens of thousands of people, sometimes more,” observed terrorism analyst J.M. Berger. “Functional anonymity insulated many adherents from the professional and social consequences of professing overt racism in the real world. And they could project their message to audiences who had not sought them out—hundreds of thousands more.”
A 2016 study by Berger found, moreover, that the potential recruitment base for white nationalists was substantially larger than for Islamic State, in large part because whites living in Western nations have much more technology at their disposal. Berger found that white nationalists had surged in audience size—by as much as 600 percent—in 2012 alone.
Key among the findings:
The white nationalist datasets examined outperformed ISIS in most current metrics and many historical metrics. White nationalists and Nazis had substantially higher follower counts than ISIS supporters, and tweeted more often. ISIS supporters had better discipline regarding consistent use of the movement’s hashtags, but trailed in virtually every other respect. The clear advantage enjoyed by white nationalists was attributable in part to the effects of aggressive suspensions of accounts associated with ISIS networks.
Berger’s outlook is not optimistic: “The current mainstreaming of white nationalism likely poses the most imminent threat of expanded broadcast violence, which the current political cycle is likely to aggravate,” he writes. “In a best-case scenario, the forces of tolerance and pluralism will organically evolve social media tools and dynamics that we cannot yet foresee, which will restore the status quo of a strong and resilient social center. While this is possible, maybe even likely, it seems certain that many years will pass before such tools and dynamics emerge and become widely adopted.”
Christopher Hasson’s planned killing spree is almost certainly not an isolated case, given how widespread and substantial the tide of white-nationalist recruitment has been in the past decade. And while much of American law enforcement’s focus when it comes to domestic terrorism has been on radical Islamists, the ability of law enforcement to stem the violence accompanying the white-nationalist has been limited at best, especially given the limits of resources devoted to combating far-right domestic terrorism.
This has been underscored by the ongoing reality that the U.S.’s federal anti-terrorism statutes attach multiple criminal penalties to international terrorism, but have none whatsoever for acts of domestic terrorism. This lack of statutory teeth hampers law enforcement’s ability to attack the problem, and correcting this oversight is long overdue.
And it has been worsened in many cases, such as that of Portland Police officers in their kid-glove handling of violent far-right extremists, by a right-wing culture inside the nation’s law enforcement offices.
Christopher Hasson is not the first domestic terrorist in this trend. After all, it’s been a short few weeks since the nation watched scripted violence enacted by a would-be pipe bomber and fanatical Donald Trump devotee named Cesar Sayoc who targeted the president’s critics, followed by a horrifying massacre at a Jewish synagogue fueled by a volatile mix of classic anti-Semitism and hysteria over the so-called “border caravan.”
There were other incidents before these. And, as certain as the sun rises, there will be more in the future. The question is whether we have the political will to do something about it.
