During the war with the Islamic State, I sometimes heard U.S. officials and analysts express something like relief that the group had declared a “caliphate” with recognizable borders in Syria and Iraq, even flying its flag atop Mosul’s historic Great Mosque of al-Nuri. A state was something the U.S. military could take away. An ideology is much harder to defeat. That’s the problem America faces as it grapples with the threat of white-nationalist terrorism today. Against ISIS, America deployed drones, proxy armies, and hundreds upon hundreds of air strikes. The extremist protostate that once controlled millions of people is dead. The ideology that inspired ISIS, however, remains alive. Last weekend’s shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which a gunman targeting Hispanic immigrants killed 22 people at a Walmart, is the latest in a series of painful reminders that Americans are under attack by adherents of another extremist ideology. U.S. authorities were quick to label it an act of domestic terrorism, amid a growing chorus of voices calling for Islamist and white-nationalist extremism to be treated as similar threats. “FBI classifies it as domestic terrorism, but ‘white terrorism’ is more precise. Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have. Attacks such as the one in El Paso mirror the sort of ISIS attack that became more common as its caliphate deteriorated. Whereas ISIS operatives once planned and coordinated attacks such as those in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016, it eventually grew more dependent on random acts of violence by so-called lone wolves inspired by the group’s ideology. These relatively unsophisticated atrocities—driving a truck into a crowd, for example, or shooting up an Orlando nightclub—paled in comparison to the type of terrorist operations with which Americans became familiar on 9/11. But they were effective at making the threat seem like it could come from anyone, anytime, and at turning people’s suspicions on one another. Part of ISIS’s goal was to provoke civil strife in Western countries by turning Muslims and non-Muslims against one another. But even as ISIS fades from the concerns of many Americans, a wider unrest seems only to be intensifying in U.S. society.