Denying domestic terrorism

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Much more likely to be the victim of right-wing terrorism compared to radical Islam terrorism in the US

Last Thursday, Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Trump, went on Breitbart News Daily and made a case that the media should take it easier on white supremacists. While dismissing the notion of “lone wolf” terror attacks, Gorka discussed Timothy McVeigh, a right-wing extremist who wasn’t connected to ISIS or al Qaeda and killed 168 people when he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Gorka, however, suggested that the Oklahoma City was ancient history, and that McVeigh is not the sort of person we should be worried about in 2017. “It’s this constant, ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t, Maggie Haberman,” he said. “Go to Sinjar. Go to the Middle East, and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.”
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Gorka’s take was bad at the time — he overlooked data indicating that over a nearly 14 year span following the 9/11 attacks, a person in America was [url=https://thinkprogress.org/you-are-more-than-7-times-as-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-right-wing-extremist-than-by-muslim-terrorists-417f3c3461db/#.iyock8twd]much more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim. But his comments looked even worse on Saturday, when an alleged Nazi sympathizer plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing one.

Then, on Monday, news broke of another alleged right-wing plot. The Department of Justice announced that 23-year-old Jerry Varnell was arrested on Saturday “after he failed to detonate what he believed to be an explosives-laden van he had parked in an alley” next to an Oklahoma City bank. Varnell was arrested after a months-long undercover FBI investigation. The Washington Post, citing court documents, reports that Varnell was motivated by “an admiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy Mc­Veigh.”

Days after White House adviser dismissed Oklahoma City bombing, feds disrupt McVeigh-inspired plot – ThinkProgress

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For many Americans, the realization came as a shock. This wasn’t supposed to happen in 2017. But it’s true: America has a white supremacist problem.

It’s not just Charlottesville. In another horrific terrorist attack by another young white supremacist, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people in a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Generally, more terrorist attacks in the US are perpetrated by right-wing extremists than by Islamists, according to data from Reveal (although, overall, there are still very few terrorist acts in the US).

It raises the question: What is leading these people to such extremes?
I turned to experts on radicalization and terrorism for answers. One thing that surprised me: They consistently said that the processes of radicalization are similar across ideologies, whether the person is a jihadist, a white supremacist, or some other belief system...

One thing experts emphasize: There is no single pathway to radicalization, and there are many contributors to radicalization. But generally, radicalization takes root when someone has some sort of problem — whether about his own life, society at large, or something else entirely — and a radical ideology or group provides an answer to that problem. He may seek out that radical ideology himself, or a group will come to him. J.M. Berger, an expert on terrorism and author of Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, explained in a talk that sources of grievances can be broadly broken into two categories: personal issues and social issues. For personal, he cited economic insecurity, loss of a loved one, exposure to violence, relocation, religious conversion, and some kinds of mental illness. For social, he cited war and insurgency, rapidly changing demographics, swift changes in civil society or civil rights, watershed changes in communication technology, efforts to foment uncertainty by state actors, and economic upheaval.

The radicalization of white Americans - Vox

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In May 2017, Erin Kearns, an adjunct instructor at American University, gave a lecture on terrorism in the United States. Jihadists, she said, commit only a small portion of attacks on American soil, just 12 percent—far fewer, in fact, than right-wing extremists do. People with far-right beliefs, like white supremacists and nationalists, were responsible for 35 percent of the attacks that had happened on American soil over the previous seven years, up from 6 percent in the 2000s. Not long after Kearns’s lecture, conservative media sites the Daily Caller and College Fixran articles attacking her and her methodology. PJ Media said she had been “trying to indoctrinate college students.” (Jihadists, they pointed out, had killed a greater number of people.)

The data Kearns used was solid, however. It had been gathered by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which was founded in 2002, shortly after the September 11 attacks. Since 2005, officials at the departments of State and Homeland Security have used the GTD’s roughly 180,000 entries, each one listing a terrorist incident around the world, to analyze patterns of violence and develop counterterrorism strategies. The entries date as far back as 1970. Homeland Security provided much of the funding for the project in its early years, and since 2012, State has taken it on. The summer after Kearns’s lecture at American, Erin Miller, a criminologist who runs the GTD, learned that the federal government would no longer be funding the organization’s work. 

But the Global Terrorism Database is not the first program to be shuttered after it called attention to the rise in violence on the right. Shortly after Donald Trump took office, the administration rescinded a $400,000 grant to Life After Hate, a group dedicated to stopping right-wing extremism in America. The Department of Homeland Security also backed out of a $867,000 grant promised to researchers at the University of North Carolina who were developing a program to stop young people from embracing ideologies like jihadism and white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnership, an arm of DHS whose mission is to prevent violent extremism before it begins, had administered those grants. After Trump took office, its name was changed, its staff cut in half, and its budget slashed by more than 85 percent.

Republicans have tried to bury reports about right-wing terror before. Perhaps the best-known instance occurred in 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security, under Obama appointee Janet Napolitano, releasedan intelligence brief outlining how white supremacists, radical anti-abortionists, and a few “disgruntled” veterans were particularly susceptible to radicalization.

A Database Showed Far-Right Terror on the Rise. Then Trump Defunded It. | The New Republic

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While denying the existence of home grown right-wing terrorism and defunding organizations that track these (see previous entry in this thread), the Trump government keeps on lying about terrorism threat from the border with Mexico..

The claim that 4000, or nearly 4000 terrorists, or suspected terrorists, were captured at the southern border is a total lie. The goal: $5.7 billion so Trump can fulfill a campaign promise to build his wall. (The $5.7 billion is only a downpayment.) And now, thanks to NBC News’ Julia Ainsley, we can prove it’s a total lie. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered only six immigrants on the U.S-Mexico border in the first half of fiscal year 2018 whose names were on a federal government list of known or suspected terrorists, according to CBP data as of May 2018 obtained by NBC News,” she reports. When confronted with this fact, that just six people were confronted (NBC doesn’t even say arrested, just approached,) Nielsen doubled-down and defended her lie:

Internet torches Trump and his associates after report reveals 6 – not 4000 – suspected terrorists have been stopped at the border – Alternet.org