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How Many Attacks Will It Take Until the White-Supremacist reat Is Taken Seriously?

FBI Director Christopher Wray said recently that the bureau doesn’t “investigate the

ideology, no matter how repugnant. We investigate violence.”

By Uri Friedman

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A police cordon is seen after a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 3,

2019. (Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters)

AUGUST 4, 2019 SAVED STORIES SAVESHARE

Updated at 2:34 p.m. ET on August 4, 2019.

ere was, it seems, no time to avert the massacre.

e anti-immigrant, white-nationalist manifesto heralding an imminent attack was

uploaded to the online message board 8chan only minutes before a shooter killed at

least 20 people out shopping on a late-summer Saturday in El Paso, Texas.

But in another sense, if U.S. authorities con�rm that the document was written by

the 21-year-old white male suspected of committing the atrocity, then there was

plenty of time—numerous years in which violence by far-right, white-supremacist

extremists has emerged as arguably the premier domestic-terrorist threat in the United

States. e government may be working to prevent these violent acts, but it’s devoted

less attention and fewer resources to the toxic ideology that knits them together.

e Anti-Defamation League recently reported that right-wing extremists were linked

to more murders in the United States (at least 50) in 2018 than in any other year

since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed an Oklahoma City federal building.

e organization also found that in the past decade, roughly 73 percent of extremist-

related fatalities have been associated with domestic right-wing extremists, relative to

about 23 percent attributed to Islamist extremists.

Such extremists have been tied to deadly rampages over the past year at synagogues in

Pittsburgh and Poway, California, and possibly to a mass shooting just last week at a

garlic festival in California. e statement posted shortly before the El Paso shooting

cited the live-streamed assault on two mosques in New Zealand earlier this year, along

with that perpetrator’s sprawling white-nationalist manifesto, as inspiration. (e

motive for a killing spree in Dayton, Ohio, mere hours after the El Paso shooting isn’t

yet clear.)

Read: Ideology kills. How do you police it?

President Donald Trump, who has stoked fear of immigrants, in�amed racial

divisions, and excused the activities of white nationalists, has cut funding for, and in

some cases wholly eliminated, initiatives begun under Barack Obama to counter

violent extremism (known as “CVE”), including of the white-supremacist variety. But

the Obama administration’s efforts also tend to be exaggerated. Today the U.S.

government’s CVE programs “largely continue as they have for the past decade:

underfunded, understaffed, and focused on individuals in�uenced by the Islamic State

and other jihadi groups more than right-wing extremists,” the extremism experts

Seamus Hughes and Haroro Ingram wrote in March.

“e overwhelming majority of our domestic counterterrorism infrastructure is geared

toward the threat of international [jihadist] terrorism,” the former Department of

Homeland Security official George Selim told me.

e FBI has noted that most of its domestic-terrorism cases featuring a racial motive

involve white supremacists. e bureau doesn’t “investigate the ideology, no matter

how repugnant. We investigate violence,” FBI Director Christopher Wray explained

in July, adding that the agency operates with broad categories of “racially motivated”

violence in mind.

Yet domestic terrorism by white nationalists is too often treated as “isolated,

unconnected incidents,” argues the terrorism expert Clint Watts. is violence looks

different than the sophisticated international jihadist attacks that Americans have

come to associate with “terrorism” over the decades. It is carried out by Americans

using guns, and thus bound up in the divisive political debate about gun violence.

And it is largely a leaderless movement, in contrast to groups such as al-Qaeda and

ISIS, which have identi�able leaders. (In this, it has more in common with

homegrown jihadist terrorism.) ese differences, however, are deceptive. Watts

points out that in recent years, discernible patterns have developed in white-

nationalist violence—the recurring targeting, for example, of minorities, and

especially of black, Jewish, and Muslim places of worship.

Read: How white-supremacist violence echoes other forms of terrorism

Watts wants Congress to make domestic terrorism a federal crime (suspected domestic

terrorists now typically face gun, conspiracy, or hate-crime charges) and to pass a law

for designating domestic terrorism organizations and domestic terrorists (the State

Department does this for international terrorists and terrorist groups). He’s also

proposed that the FBI director launch a national domestic-terrorism case for “white-

nationalist-inspired terrorism,” which would “help the FBI dedicate more resources

and personnel to white-nationalist terrorism, may help them detect violent plots

earlier, and increase the amount of information for sharing with state and local

partners who may be better informed and positioned for thwarting extremist

violence.”

Short of opening such an investigation or reacting to violent acts, Watts notes, it’s

nearly impossible for federal investigators to prevent white-nationalist attacks, since

would-be perpetrators’ speech is protected by the First Amendment and their access to

arms assured by the Second Amendment.

All the government can currently do to combat the threat of white-supremacist

domestic terrorism is “arrest, prosecute, and imprison” through investigations into

possible violations of federal criminal law, explained Selim, who’s now with the Anti-

Defamation League. We don’t yet have the full picture of the El Paso attack, he

stressed, but considering what we know so far, the FBI had no basis for initiating an

investigation or making an arrest prior to the shooting.

If the allegations and the alleged shooter’s connection to the manifesto are proved

true, “then this is just another node of where the federal government, as well as state

and local law enforcement, need to continue to expand the scope of their risk and

threat detection into social-media channels like the ones allegedly used in this and

other incidents of domestic terror,” Selim said.

“ere’s an open and ongoing debate about whether the government has an

appropriate role �ghting ideologies at all, but if it’s going to �ght one ideology, such

as jihadism, it should take an even-handed approach and also confront white

supremacist ideology,” J. M. Berger, an expert on extremist ideologies, told me by

email. “e government was doing little programmatic work under the Obama

administration in this respect, and it’s doing even less programmatic work now.”

“At this point,” he added, “it would be a win if the administration would just stop

throwing red meat to white supremacists, but there seems to be little chance of that.”

is article is part of “e Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the

Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute.

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