Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: The Making of a Right-Wing Armed Insurgency: Homegrown Terrorists, Armed, Dangerous and Confronting Social Justice Demonstrators

September 10, 2020

Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally (Anthony Crider)

By Bill Berkowitz 

The 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia may have shocked the nation with its open Nazi salutes, tiki torch parades, and chants of “Jews will not replace us.” National condemnation — although not by President Trump — forced many of the participating groups back to the drawing board. It was only a temporary retrenchment. Three years later, these hate groups appear to be multiplying and they are storming back Into the streets with a vengeance. This time their selected targets are supporters of Black Lives Matter and protesters against racial injustice. 

In May 2020, Boogaloo Boy, Air Force Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo used the demonstrations against the police murder of George Floyd as cover when he executed David Patrick Underwood, a security officer standing outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland, California, and subsequently killed Sheriff Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller in Santa Cruz County. Months later, in his speech at the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence, talking about law and order blatantly lied, while making it seem like Black Lives Matter protesters were responsible for the deaths of these two officers. 

In the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the reprehensible shooting of James Blake in the back seven times by police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, there have been ongoing demonstrations across the country against police brutality and racial injustice. However, during the past several weeks the nation has seen a significant increase in counter demonstrations by white nationalist supporters of President Donald Trump. 

In addition to the murder of two demonstrators in August by 17-year old Kyle Rittenhouse, a self-identified militia member, car caravans --– a Covid-era social justice protest -- have now been adopted by armed white nationalists/supremacists with chilling effect in Oregon.  

The Trump administration, no longer dog whistling to the far right, is out and out encouraging these far right demonstrations, giving them his stamp of approval. Instead of condemning the Kenosha murders, Trump said: Rittenhouse “was trying to get away from them, and he fell, and then, they violently attacked him. I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would have been killed. It’s under investigation.” 

 “If Donald Trump is reelected president, expect more violence from white nationalists and far-right extremist groups,” The Forward’s Stewart Ain recently wrote. “If he is not reelected, expect more violence as well.” There is no doubt that Donald Trump continues to embolden those groups. 

“Should he win, they will feel increasingly empowered,” said Ken Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College in New York. “The people on the right see Trump as supporting them.”

Escalating homegrown terrorism

According to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) incidents of homegrown terrorism has increased dramatically over the past few years. And while anarchists, ISIS, and religious extremists might be involved in some terrorist incidents and attacks, most experts believe that the main threat is from white supremacists. 

A recent CSIS Brief titled “The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States” examined “the state of terrorism in the United States. ... [by] ask[ing] two sets of questions. First, what are the most significant types of terrorism in the United States, and how has the terrorism threat in the U.S. homeland evolved over time? Second, what are the implications for terrorism over the next year?“

To answer these questions CSIS looked at “893 terrorist plots and attacks in the United States between January 1994 and May 2020.“

Over this time period far-right terrorist activities and threats of violence far outpaced activities by any other groups. “Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years.”

The CSIS Brief is divided into four sections: a definition of “terrorism and its main types, followed by an analysis of “terrorism trends in the United States since 1994.” The third and fourth sections “examines far-right, far-left, and religious networks ... . [and] highlights the terrorism threat over the next year.”

In discussing the growth of right-wing terrorism the report states: “In 2019, for example, right-wing extremists perpetrated nearly two-thirds of the terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, and they committed over 90 percent of the attacks and plots between January 1 and May 8, 2020. …although religious extremists were responsible for the most fatalities because of the 9/11 attacks, right-wing perpetrators were responsible for more than half of all annual fatalities in 14 of the 21 years during which fatal attacks occurred.” 

The report concluded: “Terrorism in the United States will likely increase over the next year in response to several factors. One of the most concerning is the 2020 U.S. presidential election, before and after which extremists may resort to violence, depending on the outcome of the election.”

Win or lose, Trump’s troops are looking for trouble

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said that if Trump loses the election, far-right extremists “will be angry and continue down the path of radical terrorist attacks thinking they have to use a gun to solve political problems. They will feel the end of white supremacy is here and that the only thing left are mass attacks to change the political dynamic.”

Beirich added: “There is no question there will be more violence. We’ve already seen militia attempt to attack Black Lives Matter protesters in Las Vegas. And the Boogaloo white supremacist group shot and killed two cops in California in May.”

“What we saw in Charlottesville is a harbinger of the future,” said Jalane Schmidt, an activist and religious studies professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

A Biden victory could actually embolden white nationalists, as far-right extremists might “try to use the election to energize their followers and say Biden is going to let in immigrants and Muslims, and so we need to redouble our efforts and reach out and mobilize people in the same way they did after [Barack] Obama was elected,” Matt Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told The Forward’s Stewart Ain.