Foreign terrorist organizations and those they inspire on American soil continue to pose the most serious threat of high lethality and high economic-social effect attacks against the nation. This threat is more serious than that posed by domestic white supremacist organizations.
I note this in light of the many pundits who claim that the opposite is true. They say that Salafi-Jihadism, the encompassing ideology of al Qaeda and the Islamic State, is today a lesser threat vector than violent white supremacy movements. Take New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Marking the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on Friday, Krugman argued that “it’s now clear that the real threat to America comes not from foreign terrorists but from home-grown white supremacists. But you know what? That was true even in 2001.”
That assessment was and remains incorrect.
For a start, while it is true that lone wolf actors presently pose the primary threat to the homeland, inspired jihadists with near-term violent agendas pose the greatest threat of mass casualty attacks. White supremacist mass casualty plans are rarer than with Salafi-Jihadists and tend to prioritize individual assassination plots and symbolic harassment. More on that in a moment.
But first, it’s crucial you don’t misunderstand me here. It is manifestly true that violent white supremacists represent a serious and growing terrorist challenge. As I noted during the early days of this year’s Black Lives Matter protests, white supremacist groups and individuals plotted terrorist attacks on groups of innocent people. Primarily motivated by Nazi ideological understandings of racial inferiority and reciprocal conspiracies, white supremacist organizations seek to segregate, subjugate, or eliminate those they see as parasitical invaders in America — most notably, black people in the United States. Where we look to the Holocaust and Nazi tyranny with anger and disgust, white supremacists see Adolf Hitler as a visionary whose ambitions will, one way or another, ultimately find fulfillment. Of course, Hitler was actually, and quite literally, a complete idiot. Still, white supremacy finds continued support for the same basic reason that Salafi-Jihadism finds support.
Namely, in its offering of a higher cause for individuals who find their lives lacking purpose or deserved fulfillment. This dynamic explains why so many terrorists in Europe tend to be well educated but professionally unsuccessful. They feel they are owed something and destined for something more. Terrorism gives them that cause. Violent white supremacy offers its supporters a similar purpose, explaining that personal failings are not actually personal at all. Rather, to them, these failings are the consequence of an unjust conspiracy. White supremacy also offers a critical social and security component in its appeal paradigm. Related criminal networks are saturated in prisons across the nation, and the opportunity to meet “brothers” outside to drink, socialize, and rant about an American restoration is appealing to some folks. It’s worth noting that the ranting factor has a positive to the rest of us. For one, it attracts law enforcement attention to those promising violence (check out websites such as Stormfront). But it also redirects some white supremacists away from violence, giving them a sense of political constituency in a controlled context. This is more rarely the case in Europe, where speech laws feed white supremacists’ narratives of persecution and societal alienation.
As I say, however, violent white supremacist groups aren’t as great of a threat as organized Salafi-Jihadist organizations.
Consider the white supremacist groups’ vulnerability to law enforcement penetration. Prior incarceration experience is valued as a linchpin of gang hierarchies, further making these groups liable to FBI identification, penetration, and the recruitment of leadership figures as double agents (“help us, or go back to prison: you pick”). Violent white supremacists also tend to lack operational security skills of the kind that define operations officers in groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS. Without going into details, white supremacist attack officers are not very good at avoiding ‘pinging’ the radar of counterterrorism task forces. And since the middle-late period of the Obama administration, monitoring of these violent-minded actors has been well resourced and prioritized in the federal law enforcement community. While they do not publicize their operations (so as to protect tactics and avoid inspired follow-on plots), the FBI and the Secret Service were highly successful at preventing a number of racially motivated plots during the Obama administration.
There’s also a critical distinction between what white supremacists and Salafi-Jihadist groups such as ISIS actually seek. Where white supremacists seek the liberation of the nation (and yes, sometimes seek a race war to that end), ISIS seeks the annihilation of the nation. This motivates ISIS towards maximized bloodletting via platforms up to the ideal of weapons of mass destruction. Violent white supremacist groups tend to pursue evil but more casualty-restricted plots. To emphasize, there is an inherent nihilism in the most potent veins of violent Salafi-Jihadism. This motivates an understanding that the imposition of absolute subjugation upon friend and enemy alike, whether the person is an adult, a child, or a recently born baby, is the truest act of service to God. But where, as in America, these terrorists cannot hope to subjugate lives under their political theology, they resort to the next best thing: purification via annihilation. This factor demands prioritized counterterrorism attention in that it proffers continual attack plotting centered in mass casualty maximization. Incidentally, it also explains why the dilution of Salafi-Jihadist power narratives is so important.
In short, the nation’s counterterrorism apparatus must cast a wide net. Violent white supremacists demand serious attention. But we must be prudent as to the nature of the threat in any one moment. Resources are limited, after all. As of today, it remains lone jihadists and their foreign ideological sponsors, not white supremacists, who absorb the most intense resourcing of FBI investigations.
