Senate Report on Domestic Terrorism Names White Supremacy As the Chief Problem

Recently, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) released the report “The Rising Threat of Domestic Terrorism.” The chief concern? White supremacist groups. The fourth paragraph of the Executive Summary reads:

“Since 2019, DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have repeatedly identified domestic terrorism, in particular white supremacist violence, as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland, including in multiple threat alerts provided to Congress and law enforcement agencies across the country. Despite this acknowledgement (sic) and multiple analyses, plans, and National Strategies across multiple Administrations, this investigation found that the federal government has continued to allocate resources disproportionately aligned to international terrorist threats over domestic terrorist threats.”

The report says that the federal government has failed to track and report data on domestic terrorism, despite congressional requirements to do so. It also blames social media platforms and their algorithms for guiding people into dangerous content and names QAnon and Pizzagate as two examples. The report lists nine examples of racially motivated or anti-Semitic attacks starting in 2015 with Dylann Roof, who shot nine black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Among other things, The report’s Findings of Fact include the following:

• Domestic terrorism has been increasing over the last several years, surpassing international terrorism as the most significant terrorism threat to the United States.
• White supremacist extremists pose the primary threat among all domestic violent extremists.
• Domestic terrorism attacks have been plotted using, and inspired by, content on social media.
• In 2019, DHS publicly acknowledged white supremacist violence as a major threat to national security for the first time, despite being aware internally of the severity of the threat for 10 years.

The report also states:

On March 2, 2021, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that ‘the problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon.’ On September 21, 2021, Director Wray testified before this Committee that FBI’s domestic terrorism caseload ‘has exploded, prompting FBI to double the personnel working on those cases in the past year. At the same hearing, National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Director Christine Abizaid testified that:

‘…the threat from domestic violent extremists (DVEs)—in particular, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, or RMVEs, and militia violent extremists, or MVEs,—has increased since 2015 and will most likely persist, in part because the factors that underpin and aggravate their motivations—like social polarization, negative perceptions about immigration, conspiracy theories promoting violence, and distrust of government institutions—will probably endure.’”

The full report is available here.

As regular readers may recall, earlier this month, PJ Media ran a story on a report from the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee entitled “FBI WHISTLEBLOWERS: WHAT THEIR DISCLOSURES INDICATE ABOUT THE POLITICIZATION OF THE FBI AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.”

The lengthy report included examples of problems such as the Biden administration weaponizing the DOJ and FBI to aggressively pursue the administration’s enemies, labeling people racists, fascists, and terrorists, while ignoring the transgressions of its friends. The report states that the Washington Field Office of the FBI has falsely manipulated data to show a rise in domestic terrorism. It also mentions how the FBI targeted parents who opposed CRT and sexually-related curricula in schools. The full report is available at the link to the story above.

To say that there are absolutely no violent white supremacist groups in the U.S. would be folly. But the report from the House Republicans would indicate that the threat is not as dire as Democrats would have us believe. The Senate report is more than just a response to that document. It is more than a refutation. Democrats are well aware that while the GOP will not have the massive majority in the House that was either anticipated or feared, there will be enough of a majority to bring things to light that Democrats would prefer to keep hidden. This is a pre-emptive strike that involves Democrats doing whatever they can to keep the focus off of them. And of course, it is part of laying the groundwork for a presidential victory in 2024.