Perspective: Domestic terrorismHow to Fight the New Domestic Terrorism

Published 19 August 2019

Pittsburgh, Tallahassee, Poway, Jeffersontown and now El Paso—these American communities have been the scene since 2018 of the most lethal mass shootings connected to white supremacist ideology, but there have been many other lesser attacks and foiled plots. In the U.S., such terrorism has now eclipsed international jihadist terrorism in both frequency and severity. Clint Watts writes in the Wall Street Journal that the formula for responding to America’s white supremacist terrorism emergency is quite clear—in part because of the U.S. hard-won experience fighting jihadists from al Qaeda and its spawn, Islamic State. “We must swiftly and carefully apply the best practices of the two decades since Sept. 11, 2001, to counter this decade’s domestic terrorist threat—by passing new laws, increasing resources and enhancing investigative capabilities,” he writes.

Pittsburgh, Tallahassee, Poway, Jeffersontown and now El Paso—these American communities have been the scene since 2018 of the most lethal mass shootings connected to white supremacist ideology, but there have been many other lesser attacks and foiled plots. In the U.S., such terrorism has now eclipsed international jihadist terrorism in both frequency and severity.

Clint Watts writ in the Wall Street Journal that the formula for responding to America’s white supremacist terrorism emergency is quite clear—in part because of the U.S. hard-won experience fighting jihadists from al Qaeda and its spawn, Islamic State. “We must swiftly and carefully apply the best practices of the two decades since Sept. 11, 2001, to counter this decade’s domestic terrorist threat—by passing new laws, increasing resources and enhancing investigative capabilities,” he writes.

The post-9/11 lessons are particularly applicable, in part, because of the similarities between the jihadists and violent white supremacists. Both extremist movements depend on the anger of alienated young men, vulnerable to moral suasion and often lacking strong community or social bonds as moderating influences in their lives. Both depend on reaching and indoctrinating recruits via the internet.

There are many similarities between white supremacy terrorists and Islamic Jihadists, but Watts notes that there are also key operational differences between the two movements, with implications for how to fight them. The three main differences between Islamic jihadists and violent white supremacists are:

·  Violent white supremacism in the U.S. has grown from the bottom up, not the top down. Lacking any such centralized leadership, white supremacist terrorism overwhelmingly involves the online self-radicalization of isolated young men, with no central terrorist headquarters to discover and target. The new terrorists don’t control territory or take shelter with sympathetic governments.

·  The ideology of the new generation of attackers is often a mishmash of overlapping or contradictory ideas. Today’s self-made domestic terrorists create their own dogmas from a long historical tradition of white supremacy, mixing conspiracy theories about Jewish cabals out to “replace” embattled white Americans with Latinos or other nonwhites, with snippets from tangential or even competing extremist ideologies (the Dayton shooter appeared to be influence by anti-free market ideology; the El Paso shooter mixed his racial hatred of Latinos with concerns about the environment; while other killers have been involved with so-called “incel” groups—short for involuntary celibates and used to denote misogynists who viciously disparage and even rape and kill women). This stew of entitlement, hatred and self-aggrandizement is likely to continue to characterize American domestic terrorism, which makes identifying would-be attackers more difficult.

·  America’s counterterrorism system has long depended on a clear partition between international and domestic terrorism. This has given focus and latitude to the fight against post-9/11 jihadists. In pursuing white supremacist terrorism, by contrast, U.S. law enforcement—from the FBI to local police forces—will find itself restricted in various ways.