We know that far-right domestic terrorism is on the rise—not just in the United States, but globally. We know the same is true of the hateful ideology of white nationalism fueling it.
Now we also know that the Trump administration has no intention of confronting or even monitoring all this.
Earlier this week, the Daily Beast reported that the final vestiges of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence-gathering section devoted to monitoring far-right domestic terrorism had been finally shuttered completely, after years of hovering in a kind of twilight zone within the agency. The office, a special branch within the section known as Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), was eviscerated initially after a 2009 DHS bulletin warned of the likelihood of military veterans being recruited by far-right groups, leading to an uproar in right-wing media and an eventual apology from the DHS secretary. Afterwards, the group’s chief analyst, Daryl Johnson, went to work in the private sector, and DHS officials reduced the group to two or three people.
The final blow, according to Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff, came in 2018 amid a reorganization by the new I&A section chief, David Glawe. “Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions,” the report says. “The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.”
Woodruff quotes an anonymous DHS official: “We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland.” However, the problems arising from a serious skew in anti-terrorism law enforcement focused on Islamist radicals, as well as in media reportage on terrorism, well predate the Trump administration.
A variety of studies, including a database analysis I constructed two years ago, have firmly established that right-wing extremists have committed nearly twice as many domestic-terrorism attacks in the United States as have radical Islamists (and about six times the number of far-left terrorist attacks) over the past dozen years or so. Our analysis found that a large majority of Islamist cases involved pre-emptive arrests, while the majority of right-wing extremist cases involved charges filed after violent crimes had already been committed. This corresponded with a significant difference in resources devoted to the different kinds of terrorism by law enforcement and prosecutorial offices—with the gradual evisceration of the right-wing-extremist section at DHS the penultimate example.
In a response to Woodruff, David Glawe insisted that DHS’s shuffling won’t negatively affect their work. “The idea presented by some that we have cut our commitment to defeating all forms of radical ideology—including white supremacist and domestic terrorist—is patently false and the exact opposite of what we have done,” he wrote. “Those pushing such a narrative either do not understand intelligence collection efforts or don’t care about the truth. The Office of Intelligence and Analysis has significantly increased tactical intelligence reporting on domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists since 2016. The intelligence shared is actionable and frequently used by partners to take immediate steps of intervention. The Office of Intelligence and Analysis coordinates with the Intelligence Community and continues to produce strategic and tactical intelligence in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who is the lead organization for Domestic Terrorism and Civil Rights Violations.”
However, you can count Daryl Johnson among those unimpressed by Glawe’s rationale. He told Daily Kos that the supposed “streamlining” measure actually reduces one of the more important safeguards within the intelligence-gathering system: namely, redundancy.
“Redundancy is built into [the] intelligence community for a purpose, to keep analysis rigorous and challenged,” Johnson told ThinkProgress. “In analysis, having redundancy is a good thing so you don’t get caught up in groupthink.” These shifts mean, Johnson said, that the FBI will be the lead agency on all domestic terrorism cases. And as a law enforcement agency, nearly all of its intelligence will be focused on criminal activity, while broader threats—such as increased animus directed at a minority religious or ethnic community—will likely go unnoticed.
The ensuing blind spots are reflected in the kinds of intelligence with which local law enforcement agencies have been working—which in turn has produced horrendous results on the ground. A recent Jason Wilson piece in the Guardian revealed that local and state law enforcement officers preparing for the violent Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville in August 2017 were given badly distorted intelligence assessments that falsely portrayed white nationalists as simply “anti-anti-fascist,” while the black-clad anarchists were portrayed as “terrorists” and the source of any likely violence.
Johnson told Daily Kos that this kind of bad analysis reflects the decline in general intelligence-gathering capabilities of American law enforcement when it comes to right-wing extremist violence. “Most agencies in the law enforcement community have adopted this jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none approach to intelligence analysis,” he said. He added that that underscored how much local law enforcement needs balanced and seasoned experts to explain these topics instead of generalists: “Sometimes, poorly trained analysts insert their own bias into their analysis,” he said.
Ex-FBI agent Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Wilson that the report prepared on Charlottesville by the Regional Organized Crime Information Center created a distorted narrative. “Somehow they have this set up almost like antifa is the antagonist, and anti-antifa has developed to resist it,” he said. “What it seems to do is completely whitewash the history of white supremacist violence in this country.” That history, he said, tells us that “far-right groups use these public spectacles as the method to incite violence. And they come knowing that it will attract protest groups from the community.”
It’s more than likely that this faulty intelligence contributed to the ensuing problems that law enforcement had in dealing with the actual violence that was unleashed on the ground. An independent inquiry into how police handled the event harshly condemned its poor preparation, as well as how it allowed white nationalists to dictate the confrontations that occurred. Ultimately, the city’s police chief resigned.
We’ve seen similar dynamics at play with police units in Portland and California treating leftists as a greater threat for violence than a range of far-right extremists with track records of violent behavior. The result has been a series of incidents in which police officers, chummy with the far-right organizers, have actively overlooked right-wing violence.
Perhaps more to the point: As the Christchurch attack and a dozen similar events have suggested, it’s perhaps more appropriate now for American law enforcement to take the threat of red-pilled right-wing MAGA-hatted extremists seriously. It’s absurdly and obscenely overdue.