Hateland

by Daryl Johnson

  Today, the number of Patriot and militia groups is significantly lower than in 2015—this decline is a typical trend under Republican presidencies. But the drop-off in extremist groups is largely the result of a wholesale embrace of Trump's agenda. Why join a marginal group training in the woods when the president had taken on your agenda? Following the president's decision to send thousands of US troops to the Mexican border to intercept a migrant “caravan,” Patriot groups and militias also sent out a call to arms. The military, however, considered the groups’ decision to self-deploy a couple hundred members as unhelpful and potentially dangerous. A memo noted that, while most members cooperate with the military, there have been “incidents of unregulated militias stealing National Guard equipment during deployments.”16

  There are, however, two much larger dangers. First, that the presence of conspiratorial paramilitary groups becomes accepted—or even critical—to law enforcement activities throughout the United States. Second, that the president or other right-wing political figures decide to use the militias as private security forces to intimidate political opponents, expanding on the example of the Portland GOP.

  In November 2018, after being asked about how police should handle a loud Antifa rally outside of right-wing journalist Tucker Carlson's house in Washington, DC, President Trump gave an inauspicious answer. According to him, the police didn't really have a role in dealing with the public disturbance. Instead, Trump suggested that Antifa was lucky that the opposition to them hadn't attacked them because they're “much stronger. Potentially much more violent. And Antifa's going to be in big trouble.”17

  As citizens, we accept that agents of the state have the monopoly on legal violence. But, today, that confidence is strongly divided along partisan lines. In 2016, 48 percent of Democratic voters expressed confidence in the police against 68 percent of Republicans. Among African Americans, that number bottomed out at 30 percent.18 Among extremist groups, Antifa protestors frequently take oppositional stances against police presence, often accusing them of favoring right-wing groups and engaging in overly militarized and unconstitutional crowd control efforts.

  The combination of declining police legitimacy among left-of-center groups and an increased use of militias as de facto security forces for mainstream right-wing groups is a troubling trend. The more public emergence of armed left-wing and African American groups—as in the late 1960s and 70s—to oppose right-wing militias and police is increasingly likely. In this case, the potential for serious, partisan violence would be high, and would quickly lead to rioting and further destabilization.

  Another scenario envisioned by Robert Davis in the November 2016 issue of Cracked magazine is a civil war that breaks along rural and urban fault lines, as opposed to a North-South divide. This dynamic is most pronounced in the Western United States. Idaho and Montana have long histories of activity by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, millenarians, survivalists, militias, and other far-right groups. The Sovereign Citizen movement was born in neighboring Oregon and California. All three Pacific coast states have a large number of militias and other extremist right-wing groups, primarily in the interior and eastern portions of the states. But the big urban centers, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, are among the most liberal cities in the country.

  What's more, in many rural areas of the country, local police are outgunned by militia groups. Some militia groups explicitly cite the success of al-Qaeda in fighting the US military to a standstill in Afghanistan as a model. If even a handful of well-prepared militiamen in these areas decided to borrow these tactics, they could cause massive damage to the cities full of Democrats, liberals, minorities, and other supposed enemies.

  Here's just one plausible scenario. US Interstate 5, which connects the major West Coast cities, stretches 1,400 miles through mostly sparsely populated areas. Tannerite is a widely available explosive that is essentially the same material used in WWII bombs. Logistically, it would be relatively easy for rural militias to plant powerful explosive devices along I-5, disrupting traffic and isolating the cities. Most importantly, in the United States, 90 percent of food is delivered by truck. If cities full of millions of people had their food supply disrupted, the resulting chaos would be massively destabilizing.

  There is, however, a much more important issue than the plausibility of widespread and sustained civil unrest: what measures might push back the violent extremism that has more than a foothold in the nation's mainstream.

  In September 2012, the increase in violent domestic extremism was extremely troubling.

  The previous month had been a busy one for violent extremists. A white supremacist killed six worshippers at a Sikh temple. Sovereign Citizens shot four sheriff's deputies, killing two. Four active duty US Army soldiers, who had formed a militia, began stockpiling weapons in an alleged plot to overthrow government. They were arrested after killing two other members whom they suspected were going to turn them in. And, a few blocks away in Washington, DC, a man non-fatally shot the security guard outside an anti-LGBT think tank.

  Between 2008 and 2012, it was already clear that extremism was on the rise. There had been a combined 149 Patriot and militia groups in 2008. In 2012, that number hit 1360.1 Meanwhile, there were 1,007 hate groups in 2012, the second highest number ever. As many of the report's predictions came to fruition, the government had taken little to no action to limit or even understand the threat.

  So, on September 19, 2012, I gave testimony in front of the Senate subcommittee on Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Extremism with the hope of changing this passive stance.

  In 1999, the FBI released a report stating that “during the past 30 years, the vast majority—but not all—of the deadly terrorist attacks occurring in the United States have been perpetrated by domestic extremists.”2 Two years later, the World Trade Center went down and US intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and military scrambled to focus on the threat posed by agile, stateless Islamic terrorism.

  The reorientation was necessary and had some successes. Intelligence agencies were better at communicating terror threats with each other and, through Joint Terrorism Task Forces, local law enforcement. The FBI and police developed good relationships with some local Muslim leaders. No more planes were hijacked. The military had all but destroyed al-Qaeda's operational ability. But the United States’ massive counter-terrorism apparatus, which now dedicated the vast majority of resources on violent Islamic extremism, once again missed a growing threat.

  In the eleven years since 9/11, Muslim extremists had carried out five fatal attacks in the United States, killing seventeen, including thirteen in a single incident in Fort Hood, Texas. In just the four years since the 2008 presidential election, domestic non-Islamic extremists had carried out many more attacks and killed more Americans. These attacks included, but were not limited to, shooting twenty-seven law enforcement officers, killing sixteen of them. The government's response, pushing almost all its resources into preventing extremist Islamic attacks, had been woefully inadequate.

  Part of the problem was that government agencies hadn't even defined basic terms—like domestic terrorism—clearly or accurately. Take the case of an anti-tax zealot who killed an employee after crashing a small plane into an IRS processing center. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the pilot “used a terrorist tactic…but he's not necessarily the member of a terrorist group…this is an individual who had his own personal issues and personal motives.”3 Meanwhile, the FBI never publicly disclosed whether the attack was considered terrorism, but Congress passed a resolution declaring the attack an act of terrorism. Everyone had the same facts, but there were three different answers about whether or not it was terror—the defining national security threat of the day.

  Napolitano's statement also showed outdated thinking on what constitutes modern domestic extremism and terrorism. Since the 1980s, in part due to successful law enforcement efforts, domestic extremist grou
ps began to adapt what white nationalist Louis Beam called a “leaderless resistance” strategy. Ideologies and conspiracy theories shared by neo-Nazis, anti-Semitics, and white nationalists might guide the extremist, but he no longer operated as part of a large group like The Order in the early 1980s. In fact, rather than linking them with a group, contemporary domestic extremists can be better categorized according to their ideologies that inspire radicalization and motivate them toward violence.

  The switch away from large, hierarchical groups had Beam's intended effect: making it harder for law enforcement to detect individual actors. It was also much more difficult to take down a whole organization at once.

  The transition did have downsides for violent extremists. For example, it inhibited the most lethal capacities of actors who didn't already have training in, say, explosives. But the lone wolves were able to adapt. Over the past few decades, for example, readily available firearms replaced more complicated explosives as a weapon of choice. A mass shooting—or simply driving a vehicle into a crowd—required a relatively low level of training compared to blowing up a building.

  By 2012, websites and social media also provided new tools for the self-training that Beam had called for in the 1980s. The transition from large groups to single actors was increasingly preferred by extremists across the political spectrum, including jihadists.

  In other words, Secretary Napolitano's claim that someone couldn't be a terrorist or domestic extremist because they weren't part of large, well-delineated group that set off bombs was based on an extremely outdated model. We can't fight domestic terror if we can't identify it.

  There were other deficiencies with the US government's response to terrorism, including a lack of basic authoritative reporting and analysis. The National Counterterrorism Center and US Department of State provided the law enforcement and intelligence communities with an annual summary of worldwide terrorism. But there was no longer an annual report summarizing domestic terrorism within the United States, exactly where it might have been most useful for law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies.

  Beginning in 1980, the FBI published a publicly available annual report entitled “Terrorism in the United States.” Among other things, it included an array of terrorism stats, trends, FBI initiatives, and policy information that made it very useful for law enforcement threat assessment, as well as academia and the media. For unknown reasons, the FBI ceased publishing this report in 2005—just a few years before domestic extremist activity began spiking.

  This lack of information is all the more damaging to efforts to understand and mitigate domestic extremism, because the FBI is the only federal agency with devoted multiple full-time resources to research and analyze domestic terrorist tactics, tradecraft, and emerging trends. However, as valuable as their expertise is, the FBI is limited to its law enforcement mission. In other words, it has to establish “probable cause” or “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity prior to collecting, analyzing, and retaining information pertaining to domestic extremist activity. This means that the FBI's expertise is not used in, or available to, agencies that forecast and warn of domestic terrorist activity before it happens.

  The intelligence capacities of other law enforcement agencies is also limited. They might use resources to monitor some aspects of domestic extremism, but only on an ad hoc basis. Unlike the FBI, they don't expend effort to develop subject matter specialists.

  This has not always been the case. DHS had five analysts with subject matter expertise who were responsible for analyzing domestic non-Islamic extremist activity within the US. Although this group was dwarfed by DHS's Islamist extremist team, its specialized resources were essential to tracking, understanding, and predicting the rise in domestic extremism.

  By 2012, however, even that skeleton crew had been disbanded. By September, a single analyst at DHS was responsible for monitoring the entire spectrum of domestic non-Islamic extremism, a category that includes animal rights groups, ecoterrorists, neo-Nazis, black nationalists, the KKK, Sovereign Citizens, militias, and Patriot groups.

  The scope of this sole analyst was even more limited. In 2010, DHS chose to limit analysis work to three categories: violent environmental extremists, violent anarchist extremists, and violent skinheads. In other words, there was no analysis of threats from neo-Nazis, Sovereign Citizens, and other violent anti-government extremists.

  Unfortunately, this decision was not based on either threat levels or the violent capabilities of a particular group. Rather, these three groups were selected for more political reasons. First, they were the only domestic extremist movements with a history of attacking critical infrastructure. Second, all three movements were transnational in nature, supposedly mitigating any intelligence oversight, privacy, or civil rights and civil liberties concerns. Finally, and most oddly, these movements had no history of infiltrating law enforcement—thus limiting the potential for future leaks. This type of decision-making meant virtually ignoring the real and developing threats at the time, like Sovereign Citizens, militias, and black nationalists. In other words, it was not the way to secure the homeland.

  In addition to a general lack of expert information on extremism, law enforcement tends toward policing based on reports of suspicious activity. “Suspicious behavior” can be valuable, but it is too subjective a category around which to base a law enforcement policy. For one, behavior reports produce an enormous number of false positives. Since 9/11, responding to reports of suspicious activity has proven time-consuming and results in highly intrusive privacy and civil rights problems without being a very effective use of resources.

  What is missing, again, is expertise on domestic extremism, particularly an understanding of how critical ideology is to extremists’ future actions. While suspicious activity can be part of the overall equation in evaluating threats, it also needs to include an understanding of ideology, psychological factors, and—frequently—the precipitating life event(s) that precede violent extremist attacks. Combining these indicators will also likely reduce the number of false positives and resulting civil rights infringements.

  Training in Behavioral Threat Assessment is also essential to the identification of problem individuals—before another incident like the Sikh temple shooting occurs. The law enforcement community appears to have neglected this effective analytical tool, choosing instead to emphasize suspicious activity reporting. The threat management methodology as a law enforcement tool has proven effective time and again, but it is not being used.

  Unfortunately, neither my testimony—nor those of multiple experts from the FBI, DHS, and other intelligence operations—led to any of the much needed changes in the nation's lagging response to violent domestic extremism. The only meaningful change from this hearing was adding “Sikhs” to the FBI's hate crime reporting requirements.

  Although the federal government wasn't taking action on the threats, law enforcement had noticed the uptick in activity. A 2014 University of Maryland national survey of state and local law enforcement officers found that Sovereign Citizens were the “top concern” for terrorist threats.4 Jihadist-inspired terrorism ranked second, closely followed by militia/anti-government and white supremacist threats.

  Two years later, the Center for Investigative Reporting reported that, between 2008 and 2016, there were nearly twice as many domestic terrorist attacks and plots as jihadist-inspired incidents. What's more, nearly half of the jihadist incidents were FBI sting operations.5 Because they insert a motivated professional into the plot planning, sting operations are more likely to advance to the stage where an arrest can be made.

  This massive disparity was indicative of the continued lopsided nature of US government counterterrorism and investigative resources. As the threat had grown since 2012, domestic non-Islamic terrorists continued to get far fewer resources—such as analysts, agents, informants, operatives—to analyze, assess, investigate, and prosecute. Fifteen years after the attacks of 9/11, government a
gencies had still not realized that the biggest threat the country faced was not jihadism.

  In May of 2017, the FBI and DHS reported that white supremacist extremism posed a persistent threat of lethal violence, and white supremacists were responsible for forty-nine homicides in twenty-six attacks from 2000 to 2016—more than any other domestic extremist movement.

  Three months later, in August, a Congressional Research Service report again highlighted the growing threat from domestic terrorists. As in 2012, the report detailed6 the problems in law enforcement and intelligence gathering efforts, including the lack of an official domestic terrorist group list, overly broad and confusing federal definitions of “domestic terrorism,” and insufficient resources allocated to the prominent threat.

  Finally, in November 2017, three months after the fatal white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Senator Dick Durbin introduced legislation that acted on these years of recommendations and warnings. The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act took some good steps, such as requiring the offices already involved in monitoring and prosecuting domestic terrorism, such as the FBI and DHS, to provide the basic information needed to make informed decisions about combatting extremism. These groups had to issue joint annual congressional reports that assessed the domestic terrorism threat posed by white supremacists, analyzed the previous year's domestic terrorism incidents, and provided a public quantitative analysis of domestic terrorism-related assessments, investigations, incidents, arrests, indictments, prosecutions, convictions, and weapons recoveries. In other words, the bill would give senators and representatives a full reporting on what was happening on the ground in the battle against domestic extremism.