White Right-Wing Terrorism Has Grown Under Trump

Donald Trump has spent the first part of his term trying to convince Americans that terrorism is the exclusive province of muslim extremists. But that is a threat our government is dealing with.

The real threat of terrorism, one that is not being dealt with, now comes from right-wing white extremists. And it is a threat that has grown much larger and become much bolder under the administration of Donald Trump. That's because they have heard his hate-speech, and believe he has given them permission to carry out their hideous atrocities.

The following is part of an excellent article on this subject by Mark Follman in Mother Jones:

Two years ago, after President Donald Trump infamously defended a white supremacist rally that brought violence to Charlottesville, Virginia, some law enforcement leaders sounded the alarm about a resurgent threat of far-right extremism. Trump’s “very fine people” remarks in the aftermath of the deadly car attack in August 2017 amounted to “a disaster,” as one high-level federal law enforcement official put it to me then, warning: “There are real concerns about where it leads the country.”

By last July, a Mother Jones investigation documented a spate of far-right violence dating from the 2016 election, including two bomb plots and 15 attacks and killings around the country committed by people who expressed racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, or extreme anti-government views. A couple of cases included perpetrators who explicitly embraced Trump’s nativist ideas and rhetoric.

Since then, violence linked to far-right extremism has not only continued apace but has grown deadlier as the trend has converged with the mass shootings epidemic. According to Mother Jones research, there have been at least six gun rampages since last October marked by far-right ideology, including the mass murders at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; a food festival in Gilroy, California; and a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Other recent shootings—at a synagogue near San Diego, a supermarket in Kentucky, and a yoga studio in Florida—were committed by individuals who harbored racist or anti-Semitic hatred. In total, these attacks resulted in 41 victims killed and at least 52 others wounded—nearly double the amount of casualties seen from such cases during the first year and a half of Trump’s presidency, and bringing the overall carnage since Trump was elected to at least 62 people dead and 79 others injured.

“This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” the El Paso shooter stated in a document posted online just prior to his rampage, echoing a theme about migrant invasion frequently espoused by the president and his reelection campaign. The Gilroy shooter was also found to have possessed and posted about white supremacist materials on social media, although the FBI said on Tuesday that it hasn’t drawn conclusions due to his possible interest in several violent ideologies. Last fall, the synagogue attacker focused his rationale for mass murder around “caravans of migrant invaders” coming to the US border, another theme repeatedly highlighted by Trump, Fox News pundits and other political allies.

There has also been a spate of arrests in the past year for threats and plots of this nature, including by a heavily armed member of the US Coast Guard, a heavily armed man in Washington state, and a would-be arsonist in Florida. Enraged Trump supporters have targeted members of the so-called House Democratic “squad,” including one who violently threatened Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan in a profane phone tirade, and another who called Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota a “radical Muslim” and vowed to “put a bullet in her fucking skull.”

An FBI counterterrorism official stated in congressional testimony in May that “domestic terrorists pose a present and persistent threat…in fact, there have been more arrests and deaths caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years. We are most concerned about lone offenders, primarily using firearms,” he added.

In July, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that the bureau had made about 100 arrests over the previous nine months stemming from domestic terrorism investigations, and that a majority of the perpetrators were “motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”. . .

As former FBI agent Michael German put it to me last year, “Clearly, [Trump’s] racist rhetoric has empowered white supremacist groups to be much more public. It’s very dangerous because these people who have a history of violence now feel they have state sanction to commit violence.”