| | | OOPS! In the United States, right-wing violence is on the rise
By Wesley Lowery ,
Kimberly Kindy and
Andrew Ba Tran
November 25, 2018
washingtonpost.com
As a Republican, Mitchell Adkins complained of feeling like an outcast at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. “Hardcore liberals” made fun of him, he wrote, and he faced “discrimination on a daily basis.” He soon dropped out and enrolled in trade school.
But his simmering rage led him back to campus one morning in April 2017, when Adkins pulled out a machete in the campus coffee shop, demanded that patrons state their political affiliation and began slashing at Democrats.
“There was never any ambiguity about why he did it,” said Tristan Reynolds, 22, a witness to the attack, which left two women injured.
Over the past decade, attackers motivated by right-wing political ideologies have committed dozens of shootings, bombings and other acts of violence, far more than any other category of domestic extremist, according to a Washington Post analysis of data on global terrorism. While the data show a decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing groups, violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office.
This year has been especially deadly.Just last month, 13 people died in two incidents: A Kentucky gunman attempted to enter a historically black church, police say, then shot and killed two black patrons in a nearby grocery store. And an anti-Semitic loner who had expressed anger about a caravan of Central American refugees that Trump termed an “invasion” has been charged with gunning down 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history.
This month brought two more bodies: A military veteran who had railed online against women and blacks opened fire in a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women and wounding five. All told, researchers say at least 20 people have died this year in suspected right-wing attacks.
While Trump has blasted Democrats as “an angry left-wing mob” and the “party of crime,” researchers have identified just one fatal attack in 2018 that may have been motivated by left-wing ideologies. In February, Tierre Guthrie, an ex-Marine who was sympathetic to the far-left Black Nationalist movement, shot and killed a police officer trying to arrest him at his Georgia home for failing to appear in court for a traffic violation.
The uptick in right-wing terrorism comes amid a renewed national focus on hate-driven violence. The Anti-Defamation League documented a 57 percent surge in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017, especially at schools and on college campuses. Meanwhile, FBI statistics released this monthshow reported hate crimes jumped 17?percent last year.
Among them was the vehicle attack in August 2017 that killed one person and injured 35 others protesting a rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville. The accused driver, James Alex Fields Jr., 21, faces up to life in prison for multiple charges in a trial set to begin Monday.
Terrorism researchers say right-wing violence sprouted alongside white anxiety about Obama’s presidency and has accelerated in the Trump era. Trump and his aides have continuously denied that he has contributed to the rise in violence. But experts say right-wing extremists perceive the president as offering them tacit support for their cause.
After the violence in Charlottesville, for example, Trump asserted that “both sides” were equally to blame and that there were “some very fine people” among the far-right demonstrators, many of whom wore “Make America Great Again” caps while chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans.
More recently, Trump rallied crowds in the run-up to the Nov. 6 midterm elections with incendiary rhetoric about Muslims and immigrants, terming a caravan of Central American refugees an “invasion” and ordering active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If you have politicians saying things like our nation is under attack, that there are these marauding bands of immigrants coming into the country, that plays into this right-wing narrative. They begin to think it’s okay to use violence,” said Gary LaFree, criminology chairman at the University of Maryland and founding director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, said political leaders, “from the White House down, used to serve as a check on conduct and speech that was abhorrent to most people. I see that eroding.”
“The current political rhetoric is at least enabling, and certainly not discouraging, violence,” Figliuzzi said.
START maintains the federally funded Global Terrorism Database, the most comprehensive list of terrorist attacks available to the public. The database tracks terroristic incidents in the United States and around the world since 1970, defined as the threatened or actual use of violence by nonstate actors seeking to attain political, economic, religious or social goals through fear or intimidation.
Determining motivation is an imperfect science, and many acts of domestic terrorism do not sort neatly along the ideological spectrum. In many cases, such as last year’s shooting at a Las Vegas music festival that left 58 people dead, the motive is unknown. |
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