Compass World: The (Rep)rise of Domestic Terrorism

Trump supporters march in D.C. in protest of the election results two weeks after the presidential election. (Flickr)

Last Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared the attempted Capitol takeover on Jan. 6 to be domestic terrorism.

The phrases domestic terrorism and hate crime have been increasingly thrown around in recent years, and it’s easy to see why. In the past year alone, there were nearly 3,000 cases of anti-Asian attacks reported in the U.S. following the outbreak of COVID-19, recording a 150 percent increase from those reported in 2019. The Black Lives Matter movement revived in the streets last June, protesting police brutality and racial injustice. And on Jan. 6, right-wing extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol building in what has been called “an assault on democracy.” Hate seems to have become our latest language—a violent, bloody one. 

When the Cat is Away...

It’s not an unfamiliar one, though. 

For decades, the United States has been embroiled in conflicts against terrorism and extremism abroad. The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the bombings of embassies in several African countries in 1998 all defined a modern era of terrorism for America. The term “war on terrorism” was first officially used in a press release by Former U.S. President George. W. Bush a week after the September 11 attacks. 19 years later, that war on terrorism has cost taxpayers $1.57 trillion dollars and thousands of lives.

Every president since the September 11 attacks has had to deal with American involvement in wars abroad. Controversies such as the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay plagued George W. Bush’s presidency, while Obama has been heavily criticized for his liberal use of armed drone strikes as missile supplements. The Trump administration expanded Former President Barack Obama’s use of lethal counterterrorism operations in non-battlefield countries—countries where the U.S. has not been at war—and spent the past four years steadily increasing military spending. 

In his first foreign policy speech as president on February 4, Biden committed to “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” In his own words, “this war has to end.”

So the words have long existed. We’re just not used to applying them at home. 

...The Mice Will Play

“In the post-9/11 world, the threat was foreign terrorism,” Tom Ridge, the first DHS secretary, said. “The CIA and the military were the tip of the spear, and we filled the defensive gap. But now there’s another adjective in front of terrorism: domestic terrorism.”

The Capitol riots propelled domestic terrorism into the spotlight, but the threat has been playing in the background for a long time. As early as 1995, current Attorney General Merrick Garland led the Justice Department’s prosecution of the perpetrators of an Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people, including 19 children, in the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. It’s no coincidence that Garland declared investigating the Capitol insurrection to be his “first priority.” 

In 2009, Daryl Johnson, a senior Homeland Security intelligence analyst, wrote an internal report warning against the rise of right-wing extremism in the United States and its potential for violence. But the backlash was fast and furious. "I and my colleagues are trying to understand who wrote this report, why wasn't it edited or—I just don't understand how our government can look at the American people and say, ‘You're all potential terrorist threats,'" said House Minority Leader John Boehner. “When you look at this report on right-wing extremism, it includes… about two-thirds of Americans, who…  might go to church, who may have served in the military, who may be involved in community activities.” Other House Republicans called for the resignation of then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. She apologized, and the unit was ultimately dissolved. 

The past five years alone, however, are an ironic reversal. In 2015, a white supremacist walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and massacred nine Black church members. In 2017, a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia rapidly devolved into violence that killed one and injured more than thirty. In 2018’s Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, eleven were killed in “the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.” The 2019 El Paso shooting claimed twenty-three lives in what is regarded as the worst attack on Hispanic Americans in modern U.S. history. The Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys... the list of emerging actors responsible for domestic terrorism goes on. 

Wray pointed out another alarming trend in his statement last week; namely, that the number of white supremacists arrested in 2020 had almost tripled from when he started running the FBI just three years ago. Last October, the Department of Homeland Security released a report concluding that violent white supremacy is the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.” Barely three months later, the Capitol building was stormed.

Members of the alt-right stand outside Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia holding Nazi and Confederate flags. (Wikipedia Commons)

The Cat’s Out of the Bag

Is this really the time for the U.S. to be focusing on international threats? A number of world leaders answered a resounding ‘no’ following the Jan. 6 riots. 

Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Russian Upper House, said, “America is no longer charting the course, and therefore has lost all its rights to set it. And especially to impose it on others.”

In a televised speech by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani: “What happened in America showed what a failure Western democracy is… A populist man damaged the reputation of his country.”

In a tweet by Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa: “Last year, President Trump extended painful economic sanctions placed on Zimbabwe, citing concerns about Zimbabwe’s democracy. Yesterday’s events showed that the U.S. has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy.”

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it a “disgrace,” tweeting that the United States stood for democracy around the world and that an orderly transfer of power was vital. Various other U.S. allies condemned what they considered an attack on the institution of democracy itself. 

The point here is not that democracy was attacked—though it was—or that domestic terrorism needs attention—though it does. The point is that domestic terrorism has been a threat lurking in the country for years, and if we are to address the issue of the Capitol riots, we must also acknowledge the long and shameful history that set the stage for it. 

“Jan. 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,” Wray told lawmakers last Tuesday. “At the FBI, we’ve been sounding the alarm on it for a number of years now.”