The FBI is making real progress, it seems. First, top officials acknowledged that the primary domestic terrorism threat Americans face comes from white nationalist extremists (while notably not acknowledging that their previous emphases on Islamist radicals and “eco-terrorists” was grotesquely misplaced). More recently, it expanded its analytical models to include the reality that conspiracy theories play a critical role in far-right radicalization.
Now, according to The New York Times, the FBI and its Justice Department cohorts are beginning to make a concrete effort to provide outreach to the minority communities most likely to be targeted by these terrorists: African-Americans, Jews, Muslim, Latino immigrants, and LGBTQ folk.
The agents and prosecutors who are engaged in the outreach are generally saying the right things, too, which is also an encouraging sign:
“Threatening to kill Jewish people, gunning down innocent Latinos on a weekend shopping trip, planning and plotting to perpetrate murders in the name of a nonsense racial theory, sitting to pray with God-fearing people who you execute moments later — those actions don’t make you soldiers, they make you criminals,” Mr. Herdman said.
However, just as with recent indications that local and state law enforcement agencies are also stepping up to recognize the threat posed by red-pilled white nationalists, there’s a huge potential downside when it comes to any agency with as much power as the FBI: namely, that the tools they’re given to fight far-right extremists will be turned instead to target leftist groups simply engaged in dissent, as they have in the past.
That problem was present in the remarks from one of the agents quoted in the New York Times piece:
“One of the great concerns for us in the upcoming year is this domestic terrorism threat,” Mr. Smith said. “People are simply conducting acts of terror because it’s their side.”
This has echoes of the “both sides do it” mentality that has plagued law enforcement thinking on domestic terrorism for decades—the attitude embedded in official (and media) culture that, well, yes, there are violent extremists on the far right, but you will find just as many violent extremists on the far left (which is just completely afactual).
This kind of thinking—coupled with the FBI’s historical tendency to prioritize targeting left-wing radicals while largely ignoring the far right, dating back to the Hoover era—produced the misbegotten policies of the past couple of decades in which left-wing “eco-terrorists” were proclaimed the primary domestic threat to Americans and similar skewed responses to left-wing organizing. That culminated recently in the FBI’s now-discarded attempts to categorize a new kind of “black identity extremist” terrorism.
There are still people in positions of power. such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who want the Trump administration to label “antifa” a “terrorist organization,” though there is scant evidence that such a label is appropriate and it would be a true civil-liberties nightmare. If the FBI seeks to enhance its own powers to fight domestic terrorism, there have to be some kinds of barriers to those powers being misused on the wrong targets.
Faiza Patel, who oversees the Brennan Legal Center’s liberty and national security section, doesn’t believe new laws are needed. She has been arguing for a more robust response from the DOJ and the FBI both, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, by forming more focused and vigorous policies aimed at enhancing their ability to monitor these movements and to act appropriately to prevent violence.
The New York Times piece cites her on this point: “The Justice Department should also craft and make public a strategy to combat white nationalist violence, Ms. Patel said, adding that the government does not necessarily need new laws to fight domestic terrorism, just new priorities.”
Michael German of the Brennan Center, himself a former FBI agent, authored a study that explored why and how the current handling of far-right domestic terrorism by these agencies lies at the root of their inadequate responses to date:
Justice Department policies de-prioritize far-right terrorism as a national security threat, ranking it behind cases it labels “international” terrorism and those directed at domestic protest groups. These policies label a significant portion of the violence committed by far-right militants as “hate crimes” rather than terrorism before any federal evaluation of the incident takes place, and defer the investigation, prosecution, and tracking of these crimes to state and local law enforcement. While state prosecutions may ultimately be determined to be appropriate in many cases, by abandoning the responsibility to examine and account for these crimes the Justice Department blinds itself to the true scope of the threat. This practice also deprives the federal government of an intelligence base necessary to develop an effective strategy to target far-right violence.
Changing this cultural focus within these federal agencies is vital since, as DOJ prosecutor Justin Herdman told The New York Times, the threat of white nationalist terrorism is ratcheting higher, not downward: “Just based on the trend line, I don’t see where it goes down,” he said.