How Donald Trump’s Defense of White Supremacists Puts National Security at Risk
“It is clear that white supremacists feel that they are ascendant because the president isn’t pushing back hard enough."
At a press conference on August 15, President Donald Trump stood in the gold-encrusted lobby of Manhattan’s Trump Tower and refused to put the sole blame on white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend (which included the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, as well as others injured, after a driver plowed into a crowd). Speaking to several reporters, the president argued that the so-called “alt-left” — a term created to create a false equivalence between those on the “alt-right” (which is essentially a rebranding of white supremacy) and from activists opposing fascism — brought comparable levels of hate and violence to recent Unite the Right rally.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump asked. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”
The president went on to rationalize the rally, claiming that some of the white nationalists, supremacists, and neo-Nazis present were “very fine people” who just wanted to stop Confederate statues from being torn down.
Trump’s comments exposed his sympathies. White supremacists have been integral to his political rise from the beginning, and his reticence to condemn them by name this past week has been telling. At a time when white extremists are the deadliest domestic terror group in the United States, Trump’s defense of the march — essentially walking back on earlier comments he’d made condemning white supremacists specifically — excuses their brutality.
It also puts the national security of the United States in jeopardy, experts say.
“It is clear that white supremacists feel that they are ascendant because the president isn’t pushing back hard enough,” Shahed Amanullah, former senior adviser in the Obama administration specializing on counterterrorism strategies overseas, said in an email to Teen Vogue. “You have well-armed, violent ideologues who have proven they are willing to instigate and participate in violence against civilians and institutions, and who feel they have a green light to continue their activities [because of the president].
“That is the definition of a national security threat,” Amanullah added.
For the last 16 years, white supremacist terrorists have carried out more violent attacks on U.S. soil than any other domestic group, according to data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Fund report that twice as many terrorist attacks were committed by right-wing extremists, including white supremacists, than terrorists who happen to identify as Muslim from January 2008 to the end of 2016. Right-wing extremists have also been the deadliest, with one-third of attacks they committed resulting in fatalities, compared to 13% of those by Muslim terrorists.
“The [Trump] administration and its policies are doing a lot to stoke white nationalism in this country,” J.M. Berger, an associate fellow with the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague, said in an email with Teen Vogue. “White nationalists have a larger base of support than a group like ISIS to begin with, and Internet providers are not nearly as aggressive at suppressing them.”
Since Trump rose to political power, white supremacists have continued to gain traction — and their attacks have grown more frequent. The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism released a report in September showing that white nationalist Twitter accounts grew by 600% in follower growth within four years and are growing exponentially more than foreign extremist groups like ISIS. In February, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of American hate groups more than tripled in 2016, to a total of 917. According to the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, 300 violent attacks on U.S. soil per year on average are committed by right-wing terrorists. And then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 900 acts of bias-related harassment and attacks the month following Trump’s presidential win; more than 300 of those attacks were toward immigrants or Muslims.
These incidents include the shooting of two Indian men, resulting in one fatality, in Olathe, Kansas, by a white man who intended to kill Iranians; the fatal stabbing of two white men who defended two young women, one of which was Muslim, on a light rail train in Portland, Oregon; and the bombing of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota. But rather than treating white extremists like the threat they are, Trump has spent his energy insulting Senate GOP figures and military veterans on Twitter while cutting government funds that would have gone toward fighting white supremacist terrorism.
In June, the Trump administration rescinded two federal grants: one to the Department of Homeland Security for $400,000 for Life After Hate, a non-profit organization explicitly dedicated to countering white supremacist groups; the other for nearly $900,000 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose researchers were planning to establish a program to fight white supremacist groups on the Internet. The grant program was a part of the “Countering Violent Extremism” initiative that was implemented under President Barack Obama to support local efforts to thwart and combat radicalization and terrorism threats. The grant was awarded on January 13 as one of the final acts of Obama’s presidency. Then in February, the administration proposed renaming the federal government’s CVE program to “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.” While the CVE program had originally placed an overemphasis on Islamic extremism and has been criticized by civil rights groups for its sweeping surveillance on Muslim communities, the rebranding squarely frames Muslim terrorists as the only enemy worth combating.
Trump is not alone in failing to take the threat of white supremacist terrorism seriously. Congress has been instrumental in narrowing the scope of counterterrorism for decades. In 2011, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Representative Peter King (R-NY) announced that domestic terrorism hearings should focus exclusively on Muslim terrorists, arguing that the Department of Homeland Security was established in response to the 9/11 attacks. “Only al-Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation,” King said in his announcement. “Indeed, by the Justice Department’s own record, not one terror related case in the last two years involved neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, militias or anti-war groups.”
This is simply not true. As the Investigative Fund pointed out, there were about 27 terrorism incidents involving right-wing groups, and two by animal rights extremists within the last two years King cited. Less than 60 days before King’s announcement, a neo-Nazi left an explosive in backpack along an intended route for a Spokane, Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade. Another tried to detonate a truckload of IEDs on the U.S.-Mexico border. Still, to this day, King has yet to hold a hearing focusing or emphasizing on the threat of white supremacy in this country.
In April 2009, a coalition of conservative groups called for the ousting of then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano who defended a report on right-wing terrorism by stating, “we must protect the country from terrorism whether foreign or homegrown.” In the report, Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terrorism analyst at DHS, provided analysis saying that the stagnating economy and the election of the first black president could ignite flames of “violent radicalization” among the far-right and white supremacists. It also warned that loose restrictions on firearms and the challenges of military veterans resettling and integrating into their communities poses could lead to a “potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.”
The report immediately stoked backlash from Republican leaders like then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who said the report “characterize[d] men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable.” Other conservative groups claimed the report was politically biased, an attack on conservative ideology and Christian identity.
Two years later, after conservative groups and GOP lawmakers exerted more and more pressure to do so, DHS completely eviscerated the report and dissolved entire teams devoted to non-Islamic domestic terrorism. In June 2009, the agency gutted a number of DHS analysts studying domestic terrorism threats unrelated to Islamic groups, canceled several briefings on the state and local levels, and stopped the “dissemination of nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups.”
Johnson left the Department in frustration and started up his own national security consulting firm, DT Analytics, offering trainings and subscription-based portals on domestic extremism activity to law enforcement, university researchers and homeland security professionals. Now, he’s calling on the federal government to study extremism more thoroughly and invest as much in examining right-wing and white supremacist terrorism as Islamic extremist groups.
“The federal government devotes so much attention thwarting Islamic extremism when right-wing extremists commit more acts of violence than Muslim terrorists do,” Johnson said in a phone interview with Teen Vogue. One reason for that is that Islamic extremist groups, despite being small in number, tend to attempt mass catastrophic attacks. “There needs to be more money and resources to groups like Life After Hate and some of these academic institutions to give them a chance to study the phenomenon of radicalization, and to find methods of counter-messaging and establish prevention programs.”
But as the Trump administration remains fixated on Islamic extremism, and Trump keeps pandering to the far-right, any hopes of effectively countering white extremism is looking grim.
“Charlottesville was the first time in decades the white nationalist came under one umbrella to fight against the common enemy: liberals and what they represent,” Johnson said. “[It] also represents this further polarization of American politics manifesting violently.”
Trump’s Defense of White Supremacists Puts National Security at Risk
Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by Buckly J. Ewer
How Donald Trump’s Defense of White Supremacists Puts National Security at Risk
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