Hannah Allam
Drawing inspiration from a far-right shooter in New Zealand, the gunman who killed 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket in the spring used racist, dehumanizing language in his writings, singling out Jews as the real problem to be “dealt with in time.”
Nevertheless, at a congressional hearing this month on the threat of violent white supremacy, two Republican lawmakers cherry-picked a word in the Buffalo killer’s screed — “socialist” — to cast him as a radical leftist. They did not note that the shooter was referring to National Socialism, the ideology of the German Nazi Party, as Democrats and witnesses on the panel pointedly clarified.
“Any sober look” at the Buffalo shooter’s hate-filled manifesto, Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League told the lawmakers, “would recognize that attack as clearly a white-supremacist attack.”
The exchange shows the tricky role of language in the politically charged struggle over how to talk about domestic terrorism. Republican leaders portray the far left and far right as equally dangerous, an assertion contradicted by White House assessments that “the most persistent and lethal threats” to the country come from the violent right.
But “far right” also is an imperfect term, analysts say, and does not capture the complex ideologies, including some that overlap with the anarchist left, that have fueled recent attacks.
That fuzziness leaves room for bad-faith arguments and misinformation, miring an urgent threat in partisan point-scoring. Terrorism researchers said they had hoped that rising political violence culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would jolt leaders into action. Instead, they say, efforts to address violent extremism have stalled over semantics and an eagerness to blame “the other side.”
This month, just before the House Jan. 6 committee released a final report on its probe of the Capitol insurrection, Republican lawmakers released their own version, which blamed Democratic leaders for security lapses and did not mention President Donald Trump’s fiery remarks or that Trump waited hours before urging the mob to leave.
Also this month, as first reported by Roll Call, lawmakers who wrote the final defense authorization bill “deleted or diluted” all seven House-passed provisions related to extremism in the U.S. military or broader society.
Outside the government, extremism researchers are increasingly vocal with claims that the Department of Homeland Security is blocking their federally funded projects out of unspecified privacy concerns they believe are linked in part to the politics around domestic terrorism.
Analysts predict an even more contested discourse once Republicans assume control of the House. They expect that GOP leaders will mute domestic-terrorism talk and steer the focus of inquiries toward “radical leftists,” who are nowhere near as lethal or active, according to attack data.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said Republicans not only “try to bury the problem” but have fielded dozens of candidates who ran on platforms that invoked far-right, conspiratorial ideas such as the engineered “replacement” of White people, a theme expressed by men accused in the mass killings of Jewish worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue and Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, among other attacks.
An Anti-Defamation League report, “Extremism on the Ballot,” counted at least a dozen candidates in the 2022 midterms with explicit ties to extremist movements, and around 100 others had been linked in varying degrees to extremist ideologies. They were almost exclusively Republicans.
“The party itself has candidates who are running on the same idea as what inspires domestic terrorism,” Beirich said with an incredulous chuckle. “I’m laughing because it’s hard to believe I’m saying this. There will be no will for Republicans to look at any of this. Once again, terrorism — just like January 6 — ends up being a completely partisan issue that stymies any efforts to address it.”
Republicans generally have opposed government-funded attempts to study domestic terrorism, joined by influential right-wing outlets in portraying the issue as a “thought police” exercise designed to vilify conservatives and, ultimately, disarm gun-owning Americans.
GOP officials also complain of a double standard, arguing that mainstream news outlets and Democratic leaders disproportionately focus on the right-wing threat and give a pass to “antifa rioters” and left-wing extremists such as the gunman who shot six people, including then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), during a congressional baseball practice in 2017.
One striking example of how deeply the partisan divide runs on this issue was in Republican reactions to the news that a violent attacker targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had bludgeoned her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer, according to authorities.
Some Republicans, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, were criticized for remarks seen as minimizing or mocking the assault. Influential right-wing figures tried to portray the suspect as a leftist because he had a history of dabbling in all sorts of extremism before becoming fixated on Democrats, Nancy Pelosi in particular, according to court documents and a social media trail. Within the GOP, there was little appetite for introspection on how the party’s relentless demonization of Pelosi might have contributed to the mobilization of a violent fringe.
Pelosi has described Republican reactions as “disgraceful.”
Language has always played a fraught role in debates over which ideologies are labeled threats to national security. After the 9/11 attacks, Muslim advocacy groups spent years protesting that counterterrorism officials used stigmatizing rhetoric that led to civil-liberties violations and Islamophobic backlash.
Republican demands for more-nuanced language on domestic terrorism emerged as the threat evolved and FBI attack data made clear that the biggest threat now comes from far-right movements such as those involved in the Capitol attack. Soon, the surveillance and profiling that were staples of the government’s fight against Islamist militancy — and which were broadly supported by Republican leaders — were reframed in conservative outlets as part of an unconstitutional witch hunt against Christian “patriots.”
During the Trump years, Republicans typically avoided dwelling on the far-right threat unless far-left “antifa” militants were mentioned as equally concerning, a notion that took hold across wide swaths of the right.
In early 2019, during the Trump administration, Elizabeth Neumann was serving as a senior DHS counterterrorism official. A gunman had just attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Neumann recalled, and the FBI and National Counterterrorism Center began rethinking domestic-terrorism strategies.
More than six months later, “well after a whole bunch of other attacks had happened,” Neumann said, officials finally arranged a conference on domestic threats. When the teams briefed her on the work, Neumann said, she was floored to hear a fixation on definitions — finding a balance between categories that were precise enough for researchers and not too polarizing for politicians.
“I felt like we were so focused on definitions that we were kind of missing the point that we were not organized or structured [and didn’t] have any programs that are actually going to address the threat,” said Neumann, now chief strategy officer at Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism.
In that era, federal authorities started using phrases such as “RMVE,” for “racially motivated violent extremism,” which was criticized as a euphemism for deadly white supremacists. The term was also vague enough that it allowed officials pushing a “both sides” agenda to introduce a sub-category on “black identity violent extremism,” drawing outrage from civil rights groups who called it an attempt to equate Black Lives Matter protesters with far-right militants.
At a hearing in 2019, in response to questioning by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said the controversial category had been retired: “We don’t use the term ‘black identity extremism’ anymore.”
“Despite this announcement, serious concerns about the FBI’s obfuscation of the threat posed by white supremacists remain,” Booker said in a statement at the time, noting that the majority of domestic terrorist attacks in recent years had come from far-right assailants. He added, “The FBI should not be in the business of using phrases and categories that confuses this point.”
The change in administration when Joe Biden came to office introduced yet another round of confusion for researchers trying to keep up with the federal government’s shifting, acronym-filled language on domestic terrorism.
They had just gotten used to calling the DHS office overseeing counterextremism strategies the “TVTP,” for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, when it was re-branded in 2021 as CP3, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. The Trump administration’s labels such as “anarcho-Marxist violent revolutionaries” were retired. Ditto for “ethno-violence,” a softening of “white-supremacist violence,” analysts recalled.
But there was also an acknowledgment in and out of government that the old left-right terrorism spectrum was outdated, incapable of reflecting how online radicalization grabs from various ideologies and defies simple categorization. White-supremacist attackers sometimes espouse environmental extremism or misogynistic incel rhetoric. Anti-government “boogaloo” militants march alongside black-nationalist gun groups. Neo-Nazis invoke language and tactics from Islamist militants.
That blending of ideologies led to terms such as “salad-bar extremism” or “fringe fluidity” entering the lexicon of domestic terrorism studies. But where analysts saw nuance that better captures the complexity of attacks, conservative influencers saw wiggle room to further confuse public understanding of the problem and its links to right-wing politics.
The lingering confusion has hampered even DHS’s ability to identify red flags within department ranks, according to a 2022 DHS report on insider threats that found information gaps based on “a lack of an official definition of ‘domestic violence extremist’” or guidance on what constitutes extremist activity.
“It’s very much a contextual term that’s in the eye of the beholder,” Neumann said. “It’s kind of funny — we’ve now, for 21 years, spent all sorts of money on countering violent extremism and yet we don’t have a definition for what that is.”
If the government’s classifications are confusing to its own professional analysts, they are probably indecipherable to Americans trying to understand the rise in extremist violence. “RMVE” is still in use, as a subset of “DVE,” or “domestic violent extremism.” And “domestic” refers to, say, armed anti-government groups or militant anarchists, not to be confused with “homegrown,” which is reserved for U.S. operatives of foreign militant groups such as the Islamic State.
“It sounds like gobbledygook,” Beirich said. “For an average person, you have no idea what they’re talking about. The definitions keep shifting.”
In its first report on the international far-right threat, the United Nations in October introduced yet another category, for attacks fueled by xenophobia, racism and other forms of intolerance, or in the name of religion or belief — XRIRB, an acronym that has “broken my brain,” tweeted Anna Meier, a U.K.-based scholar of white-supremacist violence.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University, said: “All these labels have been attempts not to use the words ‘right’ or ‘left’ in any of this. But then it gets confusing because they’re using these awful acronyms, and no one’s using the same ones. It just becomes this alphabet soup.”
In recent months, the Biden administration has used the catchall “hate-fueled violence,” which encompasses bias-motivated crimes as well as mass-casualty terrorist attacks. Miller-Idriss praised the term for its inclusivity but said she worries that it, too, could be used to avoid the tougher conversation that unequivocally recognizes far-right movements — namely neo-Nazi groups and armed anti-government groups — as the main drivers of political violence.
“There are deep-rooted things like misogyny, antisemitism and different forms of racism that cut across the spectrum,” Miller-Idriss said. “However, the organized terroristic domestic extremist violence is coming from the far right.”
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