• Not a Suicide Pact: Urgent Strategic Recommendations for Reducing Domestic Terrorism in the United States

    America’s Bill of Rights protects U.S. citizens’ rights to free speech, to bear arms, and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, among other things. As the Supreme Court has consistently held, however, no right is absolute: All rights must be balanced against other societal needs, including and especially public safety. Barbara L. McQuade writes that as the threat of domestic terrorism metastasizes in the United States, Americans need to use the practical wisdom urged by Justice Robert L. Jackson – who, in 1949, advised that the Constitution is not “a suicide pact” — to ensure the survival of the republic.

  • Why Homicide Rates Spiked 30% During the Pandemic

    The number of homicides in the United States spiked almost 30% during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenon seen in both cities and rural areas, and in Republican and Democratic-leaning states. While there have been calls from some quarters to abolish or defund the police, the vast majority of Americans oppose getting rid of police departments.

  • Who Commits Which Crimes

    Why do some young men turn to crime, while others don’t? An international study shows that preferences such as risk tolerance, impatience and altruism as well as self-control can predict who will commit crime.

  • Threats to the U.S. Jewish Community: The Facts

    According to the FBI’s annual data on hate crimes, defined as criminal offenses which are motivated by bias, crimes targeting the Jewish community consistently constitute more than half of all religion-based crimes.

  • Civil War in the U.S. Is Unlikely Because Grievance Doesn’t Necessarily Translate Directly into Violence

    Claims that America is at the greatest risk of civil war since, well, the Civil War, recently received additional support from some experts in the field of political science. But civil wars are rare events. But even if a civil war in America is unlikely, this does not preclude the occurrence of other forms of less intense violence. Concerns about increased violent extremism in the United States recently led the U.S. Justice Department to establish a new domestic terrorism group.

  • DOJ Adding New Unit Dedicated to Combatting Domestic Terrorism

    The Justice Department’s National Security Division is adding a new unit, dedicated to combatting domestic terrorism, as attacks, threats, and associated cases continue to grow. The FBI tells lawmakers that the greatest threat of mass casualty attacks against civilians in the United States comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.

  • A Year After January 6, Is Accelerationism the New Terrorist Threat?

    Far-right extremists are attempting to incite an insurrection to hasten the downfall of what they see as a deeply corrupt U.S. government. Some could resort to deadly acts of terrorism.

  • The “Sore Loser Effect”: Rejecting Election Results Can Destabilize Democracy and Drive Terrorism

    Acceptance of electoral defeat, something political scientists call “loser’s consent,” is essential for stability and order in democracies. The refusal by a candidate or a party to accept defeat a potentially dangerous situation for the United States. New research shows that when politicians refuse to accept a free and fair democratic election’s outcome, and instead choose to promote a popular narrative of a stolen or dirty election, they place their people in physical danger. Popular tolerance for terrorism grows, and so does terrorist activity itself.

  • Examining the Denver Shooter’s Ideological Views

    On 27 December 2021, Lyndon McLeod shot and killed five individuals in Denver, Colorado before being shot and killed by a Denver police officer. Matthew Kriner, H. E. Upchurch and W. Aaron write that “Evidence suggests McLeod was deeply influenced by the misogynistic pro-masculinity culture which pervades the alt-right’s so-called manosphere.” Describing himself and his fellow extremists on his social media blog, McLeod wrote: “There are certain men who maybe only represent[s] a small percentage of men – maybe only 10-15% – but who have a disproportionate impact on the world when they get even with their enemies.”

  • In 2021, the Police Took a Page Out of the NSA’s Playbook: 2021 in Review

    Dragnet searches were once thought to be just the province of the NSA, but they are now easier than ever for domestic law enforcement to conduct as well. With increasing frequency, law enforcement has been using unconstitutional, suspicionless digital dragnet searches in an attempt to identify unknown suspects in criminal cases.

  • DOD Releases Report on Countering Extremist Activities

    DOD last week issued a report on addressing the challenge of extremist activities in the ranks. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said that “We believe only a very few violate this oath by participating in extremist activities, but even the actions of a few can have an outsized impact on unit cohesion, morale and readiness - and the physical harm some of these activities can engender can undermine the safety of our people.”

  • Blurry Ideologies and Strange Coalitions: The Evolving Landscape of Domestic Extremism

    Students of extremism and domestic terrorism have noticed an intriguing phenomenon: the convergence of far right and far left extremists and the breakdown of old ideological walls. Far-right extremists have valorized the Unabomber and praised the Taliban; a re-launched white supremacist group announced a new “Bolshevik focus” calling for the liquidation of the capitalist class; a growing ecofascist youth subculture joins with extreme racists in a call for the creation of a white ethnostate. “These trends highlight the strange and unanticipated ways in which domestic violent extremism scenes in the United States are fragmenting and reassembling,” they write.

  • U.S. Guns Sales Have Been Surging: Study

    An estimated 7.5 million U.S. adults became new gun owners over a recent 28-month span, sharply increasing the prospects for home accidents or people taking their own lives, according to new research.

  • Train Engineer Inspired by Covid-19 Conspiracy Theory to Intentionally Derail Locomotive

    A train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles pleaded guilty last week to a federal terrorism charge for intentionally running a locomotive at full speed off the end of railroad to “wake people up” to a government plot to use Covid-19 as a pretext to “take over” the country.

  • Securing U.S. Democracy

    Most of the homeland security architecture built in the past twenty years has been devoted to protecting Americans from an act of international terrorism. Carrie Cordero writes that as a result, Americans are safer than they were twenty years ago from a terrorist attack directed or inspired by foreign groups on U.S. soil. She says, though, that more significantly, the threats to American safety and security have compounded in the past two decades. “These disparate threats and circumstances have challenged the effectiveness of the homeland security enterprise.”