You would think terrorism — “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims” would be a crime in and of itself. You would be wrong. For the most part there is no terrorism law that can be used to charge those committing the ongoing domestic terrorism used by white nationalists and racists with.
Mother Jones explains —
Why hasn’t Hasson been charged as a terrorist? In part, it’s because US terrorism laws make it harder to convict for certain acts of violence if they are motivated by white supremacy.
There are about 50 terrorism statutes that can be used to prosecute far-right domestic terrorists, including for things like using a bomb, which can be characterized as a weapon of mass destruction, or for attacking a government official. But these statutes don’t apply to Hasson, partly because he hadn’t committed any violence yet, and partly because of the type of weapons he favored: According to Mary McCord, a longtime federal prosecutor who was formerly deputy assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department, there’s no terrorism statute that applies to someone who uses a firearm or a vehicle to commit violence motivated by white supremacy. For crimes involving these weapons, however, it is possible to convict if the perpetrator was motivated by a connection to an international extremist group. “If I’m the San Bernardino shooter, or if I’m Omar Mateen at Pulse nightclub and I commit my crime with a firearm, I’ve done it on behalf of ISIS, so I can be charged with material support to a terrorist organization,” she says. “If I do the same as a white supremacist”—think Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers or James Field, who used a vehicle to kill in Charlottesville, Virginia—”there’s no terrorism crime I can be charged with…There ends up being a gap.”
But overall this is nothing new. It’s just another example of our history of creating laws that make the crimes of “others” subject to much harsher penalties than they are when us white folk commit them.
We need a simple law that makes all terrorism, all “use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims”, subject to the same harsh penalties. Not 50 separate laws that all combined together can’t be used to charge most of the terrorists, as most of them are white nationalist or racist acts of terrorism, in America with terrorism.