In recent years, right wing extremism and domestic terrorism has been on the rise, not just in the United States, but around the world. From Chartlottesville, where an extremist murdered counter-protester Heather Heyer in 2017, to a 2018 attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 people were murdered, to more recently when a man murdered 49 people attending prayer services in a New Zealand mosque.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) produced a report highlighting the growing dangers. Some of the key findings from that report:
• In 2018, domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the U.S., a sharp increase from the 37 extremist related murders documented in 2017, though still lower than the totals for 2015 (70) and 2016 (72). The 50 deaths make 2018 the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970.
• The extremist-related murders in 2018 were overwhelmingly linked to right-wing extremists. Every one of the perpetrators had ties to at least one right-wing extremist movement, although one had recently switched to supporting Islamist extremism. White supremacists were responsible for the great majority of the killings, which is typically the case.
Emphasis added on that last point.
Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast has a scoop that should send shivers down your spine—the Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a domestic terror intelligence unit.
The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.
Turns out, the unit was disbanded last year. A DHS spokesman told The Daily Beast the intelligence officers had been reassigned and were still working on issues, but law enforcement told them they don’t receive anywhere near the same information they once did in regards to threats and warnings in their areas.
But Sgt. Mike Abdeen with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told The Daily Beast that his office used to receive a significant amount of material from I&A, but that the communications have dried up in recent months. For the last six months, he said, I&A has been mostly silent. He added that this has been consistent with broader changes in how the department communicates with his office.
“It’s been very quiet lately,” Abdeen said. “It’s changed with the new administration. It doesn’t seem to be as robust, as active, as important—it is important, I’m sure, but it’s not a priority. It doesn’t seem like engagement, outreach, and prevention are seen as a priority as we used to see in the past. There were roundtable meetings in the past, there was more activity, more training, more seminars. Now it seems like it’s gone away.”
Combatting domestic terrorism should be a completely bipartisan issue. It makes it even more outrageous to see DEHS resources increasingly sent to the Southern border, where the only emergency is one of the Trump administration’s own creation, keeping families and children in cages and “temporary” camps. People who merely want to come here to work hard and create a better life for their children.
Meanwhile, right wing extremists are flourishing…..and are increasingly deadly. And this administration appears to have put this issue on the back burner.