Racially Motivated Extremism Emerges as Our Greatest Domestic Threat - Horowitz

Racially Motivated Extremism Emerges as Our Greatest Domestic Threat - Horowitz

The negative effects of Donald Trump’s four years of expressing his crabbed blood and soil vision of our nation through racially charged comments and nodding and winking at expressions of white supremacism, coupled with his using the bully pulpit of the presidency to repeatedly and falsely assert that the election was stolen from him, unfortunately, are still very much with us. 

Domestic violent extremists pose an “elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021,” according to an Intelligence Community assessment released last week by the Director of National Intelligence. “Newer sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the US Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some Domestic Violent Extremists to try to engage in violence this year.”

This current Intelligence Community assessment reinforces and amplifies recent Congressional testimony by FBI Director Christopher Wray: “Unfortunately, January 6 was not an isolated event. "The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it's not going away anytime soon, said the FBI Director. He spelled out that racially motivated extremism was the largest aspect of this threat with white supremacy being the major component.  Investigations into white supremacists have tripled since 2017, reported the FBI Director.

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Studies by the Anti-Defamation League and others document that the disturbing increase in active white supremacy and the related rise in hate crimes is in large measure the result of the rhetoric and actions of the former president. Researchers using the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism map data, for example, found that "counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally. "

Similarly, the 150% increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans in 2020, documented by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, was driven at least in part by President Trump’s labeling COVID-19 as the ‘China virus’ or the ‘Kung-flu.’ “What Trump did is that he weaponized it in a way,” Professor Karthick Ramakrishnan, Professor of Public Policy at University of California, Riverside said. “Trump's rhetoric helps set a certain narrative in place — and presidents have an outsized role in terms of shaping narrative. They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing, and especially Trump, the way he frequently used Twitter as well as press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks to campaign rallies to frame the narrative in a particular way, it likely played a role.”   A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League noted a spike in bigoted comments about Asians in the immediate aftermath of remarks by the former president that included his racially incendiary labels for COVID-19.

The transfer of the presidential bully pulpit from Donald Trump to Joe Biden will over-time create less fertile soil for the flowering of white supremacism and the related growth of domestic violent extremism. And the Biden Justice Department is prioritizing and devoting more law enforcement resources to combating this dangerous threat
Still, racism and the violence that can flow from it did not begin with Donald Trump. It is a persistent American problem, which despite the progress made in this area, still vexes us. Especially, during difficult times, scapegoating people based on their skin color or ethnicity and defining them as somehow “other” resurfaces with a vengeance.

It is up to all of us to recommit ourselves to the fundamental notion that this great nation is based on the shared ideal that “all men and women are created equal”—not on identification with a particular nationality, race or ethnicity. “We, the people” means all the people.  That requires standing up to racism whenever and wherever we find it.

Ronald Reagan captured the expansive and universal spirit of America at its best in his farewell address: “I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still…And (America) she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

That is the aspirational vision of the United States that we should strive every day to achieve, leaving Donald Trump’s destructive, narrow, and racially tinged definition of our nation firmly in the rearview mirror.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.