Domestic terror in the age of Trump

Patrick Crusius is the quintessential Trump-era terror suspect: a White man, radicalized online, enmeshed in White nationalist ideology, directly inspired by preceding acts of terror and fueled by the angry belief that White men like himself are being “replaced” by brown-skinned immigrants.

“America is full of hypocrites who will blast my actions as the sole result of racism and hatred of other countries,” he wrote in his four-page manifesto, posted on 8chan just before he allegedly murdered 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, last August. “This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe.”

The horrific mass killing was promptly characterized by both journalists and authorities as an act of domestic terrorism: “There’s a statutory definition of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney John Bash of the Western District of Texas said the day after the attack – violent plots or acts intended for a domestic target, with the goal of instilling fear and furthering ideological goals. “This meets it.” The attack, he said, “appears to be designed to intimidate a civilian population. … And we’re going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is deliver swift and certain justice.”

Yet had the attack occurred only a few years earlier, there may have been a debate over whether Crusius should be considered a terror suspect at all. When Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, then-FBI Director James Comey demurred when asked whether Roof’s act constituted terrorism. And Roof himself never faced terrorism charges. As recently as last July, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that, despite the evidence, “jihadist-inspired violence” remained “the greatest terrorist threat to the homeland.”

The sea change in awareness of the domestic threat has come late. In the decade leading up to the Trump presidency, law enforcement failed to adapt as the right-wing threat grew in the United States. Nine years of domestic terror incidents compiled by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and Type Investigations and published in 2017 exposed a mismatch of efforts, with law enforcement focused on Islamist radicals with ties to overseas terror organizations, even as the primary source of domestic terror incidents, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, came from the far right.

Over the three years since, that picture has come into focus, as far-right domestic terror has become far more deadly.

That threat exploded into public view in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, the site of Unite the Right, a violent ingathering of far-right extremists. Hundreds of them, from across the country, marched to the University of Virginia’s campus with tiki torches aloft, chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” The next day, after an eruption of violent melees, a young neo-Nazi drove his car at full speed into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, maiming nearly two dozen and killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer.

The incident had an immediate impact on the public perception of terrorism – including, crucially, among law enforcement and elected officials. It had become clear that a terrorist could look like the White man next door. Robert Bowers’ alleged attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh a year later, which left 11 dead and six injured, only cemented that shift .

The nation’s political gears engaged, as Congress pressed the issue in hearings on Capitol Hill. In April 2019, at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the committee chair, sought to address the problem by citing Reveal and Type’s database:

“I will say now that it appears that federal law enforcement agencies have not taken the deadly and increasing dangers posed by White nationalist hate groups as seriously as foreign terrorist threats. The Center for Investigative Reporting … found that there were nearly twice as many attacks perpetrated or attempted by right-wing extremists, 115, compared to those identified as Islamist domestic terrorism, 63. The report also concluded that right-wing extremist attacks were more often deadly. … In fact, only 13% of Islamist cases caused fatalities. By contrast, nearly a third of attacks committed by right-wing extremists involved fatalities.”

The FBI began to respond as well. This February, Wray testified to Nadler’s committee that he had finally placed “racially motivated violent extremism” at the agency’s highest threat level, comparable to that assigned to terrorism by Islamic State actors. He said he had created a domestic terrorism and hate crimes “fusion cell” to better leverage law enforcement resources. “The danger, I think, of White supremacist violent extremism, or any other kind of violent extremism, is of course significant,” he said in testimony before another House committee the previous April. The bureau, he said, had assessed it as a “persistent, pervasive threat.”

“We’re particularly focused on domestic terrorism, especially racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” Wray told the Judiciary Committee at a subsequent hearing. “Not only is the terror threat diverse, it’s unrelenting.”

Reveal and Type have now updated the database to include domestic terror attacks and plots from 2017 through 2019, the first three years of the Trump administration. What emerges from the data is a portrait of the homegrown terrorist that is far removed from the specter that dominated the American imagination in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The perpetrators and alleged perpetrators were not always identifiable by race and gender – some were never arrested, and the race of many others was not specified in law enforcement, prison or court records. But those who were identifiable are 92% male and 51% White. A minority of plots and attacks (31%) involve Islamist extremists, while the majority (60%) involve those steeped in far-right ideologies, whether White supremacist, militia, anti-government Sovereign Citizen, or other forms of ideological racism and anti-Semitism.