8/4/19
There was, it seems, no time to avert the massacre. The 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 confirm 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. The 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. 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. The 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. President Donald Trump, who has stoked fear of immigrants, inflamed 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.
“The 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. The FBI has noted that most of its domestic-terrorism cases featuring a racial motive involve white supremacists. Yet domestic terrorism by white nationalists is too often treated as “isolated, unconnected incidents,” argues the terrorism expert Clint Watts. This violence looks different than the sophisticated international jihadist attacks that Americans have come to associate with “terrorism” over the decades. Watts wants Congress to make domestic terrorism a federal crime. “There’s an open and ongoing debate about whether the government has an appropriate role fighting ideologies at all, but if it’s going to fight 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. “The 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.”