ARGUMENT: THREAT LANDSCAPEFive Years After “Unite the Right”: Reflections on Charlottesville for Today’s Threat Landscape

Five years ago, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists from across the United States traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia for the “Unite the Right” rally. Nicholas Rasmussen and Sarah Kenny write in Just Securitythat “Unite the Right” is best appreciated as a watershed moment in U.S. politics.

Anniversaries are important because they cause us to reflect on what has been lost, and they remind us how much work still remains. That is true each September 11 when the counterterrorism (CT) community within which one of us served pauses in remembrance and resolve. It is no less true for a new generation of CT professionals, a nascent but growing community with which the other one of us identifies. Like those before them who were motivated to serve by a foreign-perpetrated Salafi-jihadist attack on the United States, a groundswell of scholars and practitioners now consider the domestic-perpetrated white power terror attack on the streets of Charlottesville their raison d’etre for work in the CT space. 

With the clear vision of hindsight, the incidents in Charlottesville five years ago sounded a wakeup call about where the United States may be headed. The very real threat of white power terror attacks, alongside other forms of political violence and radicalization that flow from the highly toxic political climate we currently live in, make for a turbulent domestic threat landscape in both city parks and virtual chatrooms. Progress against this threat will require a significantly expanded degree of multistakeholder collaboration and innovation that implicates all of us in its delivery and places responsibility for problem solving on government, private industry, and civil society alike. 

Indeed, while the tragic events in Charlottesville fell squarely within a definitional framework of domestic terrorism, there was not much evidence to suggest that the federal government was pursuing any kind of broad based strategy to deal with the growing challenge of domestic extremism and terrorism.The threat posed by racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists operating in a domestic political context was not, and had not been, a significant feature of the threat picture for Nick and the broader CT community