Remember a few weeks ago when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the rise of white nationalist violence, and Candace Owens and her right-wing partners assured everyone on the panel that it was an absurdly overblown problem? How Tucker Carlson chimed in shortly afterward with a similar admonition on Fox News?
Well, just consider this little tidbit from the testimony provided by the FBI last week to the House Committee on Homeland Security that demonstrates, once again, how utterly and completely full of crap they are: It emerges that there are currently 850 active domestic terrorism investigations underway right now.
“There’s a lot of hate out there on the internet,” said Mike McGarrity, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official. “Violent extremists around the world have access to our local communities to target and recruit and spread their messages of hate on a global scale, as we saw in the recent attack in Christchurch, New Zealand,” he said, referring to the mosque attacks by a white supremacist and member of the alt-right that killed 51 people.
McGarrity did not say whether those numbers represented an increase—or how dramatic that increase has been—but his testimony precisely reflects what we know about the state of domestic terrorism from the statistics gathered over the past decade: namely, that it has been steadily increasing, fueled by the spread of white nationalist ideology online, and it is not showing any signs of declining.
According to McGarrity, about half of those 850-plus open investigations were anti-government cases, while about 40% of them were related to race or religion. He said there were five deadly domestic terrorism attacks in 2017, and six in 2018.
The committee also heard from Brian Murphy, Homeland Security’s deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis. He told the panel that DHS officials were more focused than ever on intelligence, and touted a “round-the-clock open source collection team to track and share potentially threatening information.”
However, that enthusiastic description falls well short of the reality. What Murphy is describing is a bureaucratic reshuffling of resources within the agency that actually extinguished the only unit within DHS dedicated primarily to monitoring right-wing extremist activity.
As ex-DHS analyst Daryl Johnson told Daily Kos: “Redundancy is built into [the] intelligence community for a purpose, to keep analysis rigorous and challenged. 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 wind up as 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.
However, the largest problem all of these agencies have in dealing with the mounting problem of homegrown right-wing nationalist violence is that domestic terrorism is not a federal crime.
Current federal law allows prosecutors to charge radical Islamists with terrorism, but because of a loophole created after 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act—which describes domestic terrorism, yet oddly attaches no criminal penalties to it, though it does contain some measures that provide authorities the opportunity to charge environmental protesters with terrorism-related crimes—they have no ability to charge homegrown criminal perpetrators with domestic terrorism. Unless a perpetrator has a connection to a foreign terrorist organization, they can’t actually be charged with terrorism.
The result has been, as The Intercept recently reported, that there have been over 500 defendants charged with international terrorism, while only 34 right-wing extremists have faced such charges. It also means that federal agencies have difficulty tracking when crimes are being fueled by racial, religious, sexual, and gender animus.
Congress, the recent spate of hearings suggests, is now moving toward taking action on this front. At the end of March, Sens. Dick Durbin and Tim Kaine reintroduced a bill called the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, requiring federal law enforcement agencies to issue an annual report on domestic terrorism and provide training and resources to state and local law enforcement to better address the threat. A more substantive road map to tackling the problem, however, would include updating the Patriot Act to attach criminal penalties to domestic terrorism and make it a distinct prosecutable crime, which would also considerably assist in tracking it. It would also include consideration of newer means of cracking down on far-right domestic terrorists, including reeling in their growing connections with international white nationalist organizations, often with a violent outcome in mind.
Finally, it will be especially instructive to see which presidential candidates step to the front to seize the reins on this issue. It’s easy to say you’re against white nationalist terrorism. What’s not so simple is figuring out exactly what you’re going to do about it.
