It's not that difficult to discern that if one side is the crusades and the other side is the apparent islamic domination, and if the crusades are clearly the side that "won" then the other side is one of savagery and expansionism. And it's even easier to interpret that a savage is known as a savage because they commit savagery. It didn't even need this deep of an etymological breakdown.
Right-wing terrorism vs. Islamic terrorism - which one is the greater global threat??
- Thread starter Phil C. McNasty
- Start date
Confirmed muslim from Syria. Ironically, he was seeking asylum in Germany.
He will now get his asylum allright, in a 6 by 8 foot prison cell
www.dailymail.co.uk
He will now get his asylum allright, in a 6 by 8 foot prison cell
Suspect in German festival terror attack is a Syrian asylum seeker
The suspect of the shocking terror attack in Germany that gripped the world on Friday night has been named and charged for the first time.
Just a thought...but...don't right-wing terrorists and Islamic terrorists have a lot of overlap?
Now, before anyone goes on, yes, there are left-wing terrorists. They've done horrible things. But, in the US, the vast majority of what we could consider terror attacks (or mass shootings as they are characterized because calling them right-wing terror attacks would upset a certain political party) were done by right-wing extremists. I think the ratio might be 15:1 for right-wing v left-wing attacks. Hell, it could be even larger.
- They are deeply conservative and do not like the modern world where people different than them exist
- They target these people (and sometime members of their own race/religion, but only because they are apart of a different sect)
- They both tend to hate jews and gays
- Their victims are innocent folks caught up in the "cause"
- They believe they are fighting to preserve a way of life
Now, before anyone goes on, yes, there are left-wing terrorists. They've done horrible things. But, in the US, the vast majority of what we could consider terror attacks (or mass shootings as they are characterized because calling them right-wing terror attacks would upset a certain political party) were done by right-wing extremists. I think the ratio might be 15:1 for right-wing v left-wing attacks. Hell, it could be even larger.
Left-wingerrs probably commit fewer terror attacks then right-wingers, but Islamic terrorist attacks pale in comparison to right-wing terrorist attacks
Internationally, that's probably accurate. But in the US, it is nearly 100% right-wingers.
But thats because muslims only make up 1.34% of the population: https://www.google.ca/search?q=what...a_upv=1&sxsrf=ADLYWIIdpFxBZstGX9hLcCxaINtztDa
Imagine if muslims made up 20-30% of the population
Just some examples:
September 11 attacks - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Omar Mateen - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Boston Marathon bombing - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
They loved it though
Palestinian celebrations
edit
A group of Palestinians were filmed at Damascus Gate celebrating after they had heard local news reports of attacks on the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of Americans.[102] Fox Newsreported that in Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp, revelers fired weapons in the air, with similar celebratory gunfire also heard at the Rashidiyeh camp near the southern city of Tyre.[103] Yasser Arafat and nearly all the leaders of the Palestinian National Authority(PNA) condemned the attacks. They censored and attempted to discredit broadcasts and other Palestinian news reports justifying the attacks in America,[103]with many newspapers, magazines, websites and wire services running photographs of Palestinian public celebrations.[104][105] The PNA claimed such celebrations were not representative of the sentiments of the Palestinians, and the Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said the PNA would not allow "a few kids" to "smear the real face of the Palestinians". In an attempt to quell further reporting, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat's Cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority could not "guarantee the life" of an Associated Press(AP) cameraman if footage he filmed of post-9/11 celebrations in Nablus was broadcast. Rahman's statement prompted a formal protest from the AP bureau chief, Dan Perry.[106][105]
Lunatic Asylum probably.Confirmed muslim from Syria. Ironically, he was seeking asylum in Germany.
He will now get his asylum allright, in a 6 by 8 foot prison cell
Suspect in German festival terror attack is a Syrian asylum seeker
The suspect of the shocking terror attack in Germany that gripped the world on Friday night has been named and charged for the first time.
Here you go Lefties, this is what muslims really think of Liberals
Yes, there were some Palestinians who celebrated. But as per your quote the PNA and several of the leaders condemned those attacks. However, do you have any information about the Palestinians actually being involved in those 9/11 attacks?
Right-Wing Extremist Terrorism in the United States
Executive Summary
In recent years, violent and alarming actions by far-right extremists, from seditious plots to interfere with election results to white supremacist mass killing attacks, have thrust the issue of right-wing extremist violence into the headlines on a regular basis. In today’s America, such terrorism is not merely a threat, it’s a fact of life.
Despite this, many questions remain about right-wing terrorism. How common is it in the United States? Which extremists commit such acts and what shape do they take? To answer these questions, this report examines and analyzes 67 domestic terrorist plots and attacks by American right-wing extremists from the past six years (2017-2022).
This time range was chosen primarily for three reasons:
It is important to acknowledge that right-wing terrorism is not the only such threat facing the United States, though it is currently the most significant. Incidents of left-wing terrorism occasionally occur, though they tend to be smaller in scale and primarily directed against property. There also remains an ongoing threat from Islamist terrorism, both domestic and international, but this threat has lessened considerably from its height in the mid-2010s. Although arrests related to Islamist extremism still regularly occur, most arrests in recent years have been related to people providing material support to terrorist groups and causes abroad rather than plotting or conducting terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
Defining Domestic Terrorism
The Center on Extremism defines terrorism as a pre-planned act or attempted act of significant violence by one or more non-state actors to further an ideological, social or religious cause, or to harm perceived opponents of such causes. Significant violent acts traditionally associated with terrorism include bombings or use of other weapons of mass destruction, assassinations and targeted killings, shooting sprees, arsons and fire-bombings, kidnappings and hostage situations and, in some cases, armed robberies.
Domestic terrorism consists of acts or attempted acts of terrorism in which the perpetrators are citizens or long-time residents of the United States and are not members or agents of foreign or international terrorist organizations. In all but one of the incidents in this report, the attack also occurred or was intended to take place on U.S. soil. The sole exception involved an American servicemember who plotted an attack on other American servicemembers overseas.
These definitions exclude acts of spontaneous, unplanned violence — such as an anti-government sovereign citizen becoming angry and shooting a police officer who pulled him or her over for a traffic stop — as well as mere threats, such as someone posting an online threat to burn down a mosque or synagogue.
This incident list compiled by the Center on Extremism is by design a conservative list. However, compilers of any such list must make decisions about including or excluding certain borderline cases and reasonable people may sometimes disagree with such decisions. This report also does not include terrorist incidents that occurred in 2022 but which were only revealed in 2023.
One incident on the list is particularly complicated: the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. Over a thousand arrests have been made so far in connection with this event, including several sets of arrests of people charged with conspiracy or seditious conspiracy. These include cases involving the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and other militia groups. For simplicity’s sake, these serious cases are counted in this analysis as one combined incident rather than as separate incidents.
Many governmental and international bodies have devised their own definitions of terrorism, including the FBI, other federal and state governmental bodies and the United Nations.
Terror Over Time: A Troubling Resurgence
Terror incidents can vary considerably in number from one year to the next. Over longer spans of time, however, they highlight important broad trends in right-wing extremism. The patterns of 21st-century right-wing terrorism in the U.S. show a significant rise of terrorist incidents after a period of comparatively low activity in the early 2000s.
The history of right-wing extremism over the past 50 years has been fairly cyclical. A period of relatively low activity in the late 1970s ended with a significant resurgence of the far right in the early-to-mid 1980s, enabled in part by the major recession and farm crisis that occurred during these years. White supremacists, anti-government extremists and other far-right actors increased in numbers and activity, including violence and terrorism. By the end of the decade, the surge had passed.
The mid-to-late 1990s witnessed another major spike of right-wing extremism, propelled by a variety of causes, including deadly standoffs between the federal government and fringe groups or individuals at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993, that greatly inflamed the far right. This surge lasted until the end of the decade, after which there was a significant decline in the early 2000s, especially within the anti-government militia movement, one of the most active right-wing extremist movements of the 1990s.
However, a third surge of far-right extremism emerged in the late 2000s, characterized primarily by a revival of the militia movement and its sister anti-government extremist movement, the sovereign citizen movement. Factors spurring this resurgence included the election of Barack Obama following years of a conservative president, another major recession and a mortgage crisis comparable to the farm crisis of the 1980s. The rise of major social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube also played a substantial role in the spread of extremist ideas. The surge that started in 2008 primarily affected anti-government extremists rather than white supremacists, but in 2015 the rise of the alt right gave the white supremacist movement its own surge, bringing the largest influx of new recruits to the white supremacist movement in more than 20 years.
The Far-Right Threat Re-emerges
This one-two punch of a surge of right-wing anti-government extremism starting in 2008 followed by a surge of white supremacy beginning in 2015 helped create a steady rise of right-wing terrorism in the U.S. that has shown little sign of slowing down.
Significantly, the far right-surge of the 2010s did not fade away like the surges of the 1980s and 1990s; the number of terror incidents reflects this fact, consistently increasing from the late 2000s onward, reaching a high of 40 during the period 2020-2022.
Several factors have contributed to the high number of right-wing terror incidents over the course of the past dozen or so years, including:
Deaths Over Time: A Steady Rise
As terror incidents have increased in the long-term, so have terrorism-related deaths. The singularly high-casualty event of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombingby Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols distorts patterns in the 1990s but, leaving that event aside, right-wing terror perpetrators killed an average of around four people per year during the period 1993-2001.
Those numbers dropped considerably in the early 2000s (with only five people killed by right-wing terrorists during the period 2002-2007) before starting a steady rise in the late 2000s that reached a peak during the period 2017-19 with 39 deaths before declining in 2020-22 to 19 deaths—still a high number. This significant increase in right-wing terror deaths is not merely a result of the surges of right-wing extremism that occurred during this time frame but also, as we will see, specifically due to the rise of white supremacist shooting sprees as a terrorist tactic.
As right-wing extremism recovered from its low ebb in the early-to-mid 2000s, the number of terrorist incidents associated with it increased, as well as the number of terrorism-related deaths, creating a slow but steady and worrisome increase that has persisted over much of the past 15 years, only receding slightly in the last three years, largely because of fewer mass shooting incidents in 2020-21.
These figures do not reflect the total number of people killed by right-wing extremism during these years, because extremists also commit murders, including ideological murders, in non-terror-related incidents, so the total number of people killed by right-wing extremists is always larger than the subset of those killed specifically in terror incidents; the Center on Extremism releases annual reports on extremist-related killings that provide more detailed information on this subject. However, terrorism is one of the main sources of deadly violence from right-wing extremists.
Right-Wing Terrorism, 2017-2022: Topping the Charts
The 67 far-right terrorist attacks, attempted attacks and plots and conspiracies from 2017-2022 represent by far the highest number of such incidents in the United States in any equivalent time span in the past 30 years. They mark an increase of nearly a third over the 51 incidents from 2011-2016, which was already high.
On a year-to-year basis from 2017 to 2022, there was more fluctuation, which is fairly common. From 11 incidents in 2017, numbers dropped significantly to only 6 in 2018 before rising to 10 in 2019 and a high of 17 in 2020. Incidents dropped to 13 in 2021 and to 10 in 2022 — a lower number but still tied for the fifth-highest total from 1993-2022. It should be noted that the date recorded here for several terrorist plots is the date of the arrest, because the clear start of the plot itself was not available in the public record.
When these numbers are broken down by type of right-wing extremist, the variation during the period becomes clearer. The comparatively lower totals in 2018 and 2019 are due primarily to the absence of anti-government extremist terror incidents during those years, which largely reflects the history of the militia movement during the Trump administration.
Since the 1990s, most terror incidents involving anti-government extremists have originated within the militia movement, a movement fueled by conspiracy theories and hostility towards the federal government. However, the evolution of that movement took a peculiar turn thanks to the political rise of Donald Trump. Historically hostile to mainstream candidates from either major party, the militia movement from 2015 onwards enthusiastically supported Donald Trump in his campaign for president, viewing him as an anti-establishment outsider willing to fight the “deep state.” The militia movement also supported conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments espoused by Trump (see The Militia Movement for details).
Militia adherents were jubilant when Trump won but his victory unexpectedly threw a wrench into the movement itself. The movement drew much of its energy from its antipathy to the federal government, but when Trump became the head of that very institution, the militia movement found much of its energy sapped while Trump was in office. In 2017, for example, two of the three militia-related terror incidents that year, both committed by the same group, focused on targets other than the federal government—a mosque and an abortion clinic. The next two years saw no militia-related incidents at all.
It was only in 2020 that the militia movement began to find traction again, through opposition to state-level anti-pandemic measures, hostility to antifa and Black Lives Matter (which militia adherents incorporated into their anti-leftist conspiracy theories) and acceptance of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Militia groups showed up at armed protests around the country throughout 2020, while some militia adherents contemplated more violent acts. The most serious militia terrorist incident of 2020 involved the arrest on state or federal charges of 14 militia adherents (five of whom, however, were subsequently acquitted, though most pleaded guilty or were convicted) in Michigan for a serious plot to kidnap the governor of that state, Gretchen Witmer — notably, a state official rather than federal one.
Despite this renewed violence from the militia movement, the real increase in anti-government terrorism in 2020 came from an entirely new movement — the boogaloo movement. The boogaloo movement is similar to the militia movement in many ways, but there are also distinct differences between them. Originating in online communities in the late 2010s, the boogalooers possessed the same love of firearms and military gear that the militia movement did but evinced an even more fervent hostility towards government, especially towards law enforcement, which the boogalooers viewed as a key enemy. Though the loosely organized boogalooers overlapped with the militia movement, boogaloo adherents, unlike their militia counterparts, had no particular affection for Donald Trump, nor any reason to moderate their hostility towards the federal government while he oversaw it.
Boogaloo adherents were responsible for four of the six anti-government terror incidents of 2020 (and were also involved in the plot to kidnap Governor Witmer). Some of these incidents were shocking, including a May 2020 shooting attack targeting security personnel outside a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, which killed one person and wounded another. One of the perpetrators of that attack subsequently shot and killed a sheriff’s sergeant as law enforcement attempted to arrest him. In September, two boogalooers in Minnesota — seeking financial assistance for their plans to attack targets that included politicians, the media, buildings and monuments and even a white supremacist group — actually conspired to provide material support to the Islamist terror group Hamas.
The violent appearance of the boogalooers triggered an aggressive federal response; over the next two years the FBI made multiple arrests of boogalooers, often on weapons-related charges. The negative publicity that resulted from their violence also led to the boogaloo movement being deplatformed from many of the online spaces — most notably Facebook — where it had organized. Together, the deplatforming and the law enforcement response significantly wounded the infant boogaloo movement and arrested its sharp growth. These blows to the boogalooers likely contributed to the movement’s decline after 2020 and thus help explain why anti-government extremist terror incidents declined once again following 2020.
In contrast to the ebbs and flows of anti-government extremist terrorism, white supremacists and anti-abortion extremists were far more consistent in their violence from 2017-2022, with white supremacists contributing between three and seven incidents each year and anti-abortion extremists typically adding one or two per year.
White supremacists were responsible for the highest number of terror incidents in four of the six years between 2017 and 2022. Overall, 30 (or 45%) of the 67 terror incidents during this period came from white supremacist perpetrators, compared to only 18 (27%) for anti-government extremists. In comparison, of 150 right-wing terror incidents tracked by the COE from 1993 to 2016, white supremacists and anti-government extremists were responsible for virtually the same number of acts (62 and 63, respectively). In other words, for most of the past 30 years, white supremacists and anti-government extremists represented roughly equivalent terror threats, but in recent years, white supremacists have noticeably surpassed anti-government extremists to become the most serious far right terrorist threat in the United States.
When one looks at the number of deaths caused by right-wing terrorist incidents rather than the number of incidents themselves, the danger of white supremacist violence becomes even more apparent. From 2017 to 2022, right-wing terror attacks killed 58 people in the United States (and wounded dozens more). Of the 58 dead, all but five (91%) were killed in white supremacist attacks.
Moreover, of the 53 people killed by white supremacists, all but three (94%) were killed in white supremacist shooting sprees specifically designed to cause mass casualties. Four incidents alone, each of which shocked the nation, killed 49 people: the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 (11), the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting targeting people of Mexican descent (23), the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting targeting Black people (10) and the shooting attack on the LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs that same year (5). The presence or absence of mass shootings was the main determinant in right-wing terror casualties for all years from 2017 to 2022.
The white supremacist mass shooting attacks in recent years are part of a concerning rise in extremist-related mass killings generally over the past 12 years, a phenomenon COE explored in detail in its recent report, Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022. The white supremacist attacks are also in large part the result of the rise of a phenomenon known as white supremacist accelerationism. While historically the white supremacist movement has been divided on the use of violence, as well as its application, in recent years a number of white supremacists, primarily from the alt right and neo-Nazi segments of the white supremacist movement, have wholeheartedly embraced violence as a solution. These accelerationists argue that white supremacists will never succeed in changing or reforming modern society into some sort of white supremacist ethnostate. The only real option is to destroy this society and build a new one, as desired, from the ashes of the old one. To this end, any sort of violence that could fracture and weaken society, especially if such violence is directed at perceived enemies, is a good thing. Consequently, accelerationist white supremacists openly promote acts of violence and terrorism. They glorify past white supremacist terrorists, such as the Australian Brenton Tarrant, who committed deadly shooting attacks at mosques in New Zealand in 2018 and urge others to follow in their footsteps — even to the point of creating manuals and videos providing guidance, instructions and encouragement. The El Paso, Buffalo and Colorado Springs attacks were all committed by people seemingly inspired by accelerationism, as was the attempted mass shooting in Poway, California, in 2018.
In addition to longstanding sources of right-wing terrorism in the U.S., such as white supremacy, anti-government extremism and anti-abortion extremism, newer movements and causes have also produced violent acts and plots that have pushed domestic terrorism totals higher in recent years. Most notable among these are the toxic masculinity subculture, particularly its incel segment, and the loose conspiracy movement known as QAnon.
The term incels refers to so-called “involuntary celibates,” a group of primarily younger males who experience great difficulty in forming meaningful romantic relations with women and who have turned their frustrations into a hateful, misogynistic ideology. Incels have been responsible for several shooting sprees over the past six years.
QAnon is a broad conspiratorial movement that originated during the Trump administration. It originally centered around the oracular and conspiratorial postings of an anonymous “Q,” who purported to be an intelligence insider, and related conspiracy theories that imagined Donald Trump as a heroic figure fighting a vast, evil pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent left-leaning figures. The first “Q drop,” or posting from “Q,” occurred in October 2017; within a month, a movement had formed around the drops. Over the past few years, QAnon has grown to incorporate other conspiratorial beliefs and to become somewhat more amorphous. The movement has demonstrated the ability to motivate some people, especially volatile or unbalanced people, to violence ranging from murders to terrorist incidents.
The Shape of Right-Wing Terror
The 67 right-wing terror incidents from 2017-2022 differ considerably in their nature, from incipient plots caught by law enforcement well before any violent act could be carried out to deadly shooting sprees causing numerous casualties. Many acts were plotted or committed by lone perpetrators, while others involved members of a cell or group working together. The range of targets was very broad, though the range of weapons used or considered was much narrower.
Overall, less than half of the 67 incidents (29 of 67, or 43%) could be considered “successful.” Success is defined here not as terrorists meeting their intended goals, which in some cases were quite unrealistic, but more modestly in terms of whether the perpetrators were able to cause harm to persons or property. So, for example, the attack by an anti-abortion extremist who intended to burn down a clinic but only succeeded in damaging it would still be considered a success. Most failures were caused by law enforcement stopping the perpetrator(s) before any act could be carried out. However, one failure occurred when a bomb set at an abortion clinic by a militia group failed to detonate; another failure happened when a white supremacist who intended to burn down a synagogue was deterred by security cameras on the scene and decided at the last minute to commit an act of vandalism instead.
The vast majority (48 of 67, or 72%) of incidents involved just a single perpetrator. Eight incidents had two perpetrators, while fewer still had more than two participants (see chart). The two incidents involving the most participants were the 2020 attempt by militia members to kidnap the governor of Michigan and the 2021 storming of the Capitol (combined into one incident for this report). Lone perpetrators were far more likely to succeed in causing harm than multiple perpetrators. The 48 lone perpetrators achieved a success rate of 52%, while incidents with more than one perpetrator succeeded in causing harm only 21% of the time (see chart). Lone perpetrators were also responsible for the deadliest attacks, which all came in the form of shooting sprees. Incidents involving multiple perpetrators were the easiest for law enforcement to detect and prevent.
Regardless of the number of perpetrators, most of the terror incidents were not committed by organized extremist groups acting as groups. Even when there was more than one perpetrator, the actors involved usually constituted a loose, informal cell. Though there is a general impression that terrorist acts are committed by “terrorist groups,” that is not the reality for most domestic terrorism in the United States. Extremist groups in the United States, unlike those in lawless or semi-lawless areas of the world, tend to play more of a radicalizing and propaganda role. Groups that embark upon campaigns of violence tend to be shut down quickly by law enforcement. The accelerationist neo-Nazi group The Base is a good example. Members of The Base were arrested for three different terrorist plots in 2020 (see list of incidents, below) as part of a broader crackdown by the federal government on violent white supremacist accelerationists. These and other Base-related arrests effectively destroyed The Base as a functioning extremist group.
The most popular weapon of choice in the right-wing terror incidents of 2017-2022 was the firearm. Firearms were used or chosen to be used as the weapon in 27 of the 67 incidents (40%). In two additional incidents, perpetrators used or planned to use firearms and another type of weapon (thermite in one case and explosives in the other). The second most common type of weapon was incendiary devices, featured in 17 incidents (25%). Explosives were the chosen weapon for 12 incidents (18%), but these incidents were rarely successful. In almost every case, plots involving bombs were stopped by law enforcement before they could be carried out. A rare exception was the August 2017 bombing of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, by members of a small Illinois-based militia group. Other weapons ranged from a hammer up all the way up to a train. In some incidents — typically cases where the perpetrator was caught early in the plotting stages — the intended weapon was unclear.
Firearms and incendiary devices are both easy to obtain and easy to use. Guns, even military-style assault weapons, are ubiquitous in the United States, and easy for most people to purchase, while incendiary devices can often be assembled from household items. Neither requires experience or training to use. It’s not a coincidence that firearms and incendiary devices were both more common and more likely to be successful than a weapon like a bomb, which must be safely constructed before it can even be used.
Those terror attacks that were successful caused a tremendous amount of harm, killing 58 people — all but one from firearm wounds — and wounding or injuring dozens more. These figures do not count police officers injured during the January 6, 2021, Capitol storming, which would add at least 130 more wounded/injured to the total. In addition, 16 properties were damaged or destroyed. Religious institutions and abortion clinics were the properties most likely to be damaged or destroyed.
As bad as these totals are, the actual harm was even greater, thanks to the very nature of terrorism. Terrorist incidents shocked and spread fear in the people across the towns and cities in which they occurred and, in the worst incidents, affected the entire country. Attacks directed against specific communities, such as the Black, Muslim or Jewish communities, caused suffering for the people of those communities no matter where they resided. Attacks or plots against law enforcement and the military threatened institutions dedicated to protecting all people.
A lot more about the dangers of the Far Right Terrorism in the above link!!
Executive Summary
- Right-wing extremist terror incidents in the U.S. have been increasing since the mid-2000s, but the past six years have seen their sharpest rise yet. There were just seven right-wing terror incidents in the period 2005-2007, but by 2017-2019 there were 27, which increased to 40 in 2020-2022.
- The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism (COE) has documented 67 domestic terror incidents by right-wing extremists in the United States from 2017 to 2022. These include successful terrorist attacks, failed terrorist attacks and foiled terrorist plots.
- White supremacists were responsible for more attacks than any other type of right-wing extremist in the past six years (30 of 67, or 45%), but anti-government extremists, anti-abortion extremists and other types of right-wing extremists have also plotted and carried out attacks.
- Right-wing terror attacks during this period also resulted in more deaths (58) from such attacks than any of the previous six-year periods since the time of the Oklahoma City bombing. All but five of those deaths occurred in white supremacist attacks—primarily mass shootings directed against minority targets.
- Most incidents (72%) involved only a single perpetrator, whether an arsonist targeting an abortion clinic or a white supremacist shooter targeting a synagogue. Single perpetrators were also far more likely to successfully carry out attacks; plots with multiple perpetrators were usually stopped by law enforcement. Most incidents were not committed by organized extremist groups.
- Firearms were the most popular weapon chosen for attacks (27 of 67 incidents, or 40%, not counting two additional incidents where firearms were one of two weapon types). Incendiary devices (featured in 25% of incidents) were also popular, followed by explosive devices (18%).
- Right-wing terrorists considered a wide array of targets. Government targets were most frequently chosen by perpetrators (in 18 of 67, or 27% of incidents), closely followed by targets based on actual or perceived religion (17 of 67, or 25%), which consisted of Muslims and Jews. Abortion-related targets and targets based on race (primarily Black people) were also common, at nine and eight, respectively (13% and 12%).
In recent years, violent and alarming actions by far-right extremists, from seditious plots to interfere with election results to white supremacist mass killing attacks, have thrust the issue of right-wing extremist violence into the headlines on a regular basis. In today’s America, such terrorism is not merely a threat, it’s a fact of life.
Despite this, many questions remain about right-wing terrorism. How common is it in the United States? Which extremists commit such acts and what shape do they take? To answer these questions, this report examines and analyzes 67 domestic terrorist plots and attacks by American right-wing extremists from the past six years (2017-2022).
This time range was chosen primarily for three reasons:
- It spans the past two presidential administrations, one fully and the other through the end of its first two years.
- It highlights the violent effects of the surge of white supremacy that the U.S. experienced with the rise of the alt right in the late 2010s, which brought into the white supremacist movement a new cadre of young, newly radicalized white males. It also illustrates the violent results of the spread of white supremacist accelerationism, a belief system that openly promotes deadly attacks.
- It extends the research and analysis of an earlier Center on Extremism study of right-wing domestic terrorism, A Dark and Constant Rage: 25 Years of Right-Wing Terrorism in the United States, which examined trends in far-right domestic terrorism from 1993 through early 2017. The data from that study, updated and modified slightly based on internal review and external feedback, allows the comparison of recent domestic terrorist incidents to historical patterns.
It is important to acknowledge that right-wing terrorism is not the only such threat facing the United States, though it is currently the most significant. Incidents of left-wing terrorism occasionally occur, though they tend to be smaller in scale and primarily directed against property. There also remains an ongoing threat from Islamist terrorism, both domestic and international, but this threat has lessened considerably from its height in the mid-2010s. Although arrests related to Islamist extremism still regularly occur, most arrests in recent years have been related to people providing material support to terrorist groups and causes abroad rather than plotting or conducting terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
Defining Domestic Terrorism
The Center on Extremism defines terrorism as a pre-planned act or attempted act of significant violence by one or more non-state actors to further an ideological, social or religious cause, or to harm perceived opponents of such causes. Significant violent acts traditionally associated with terrorism include bombings or use of other weapons of mass destruction, assassinations and targeted killings, shooting sprees, arsons and fire-bombings, kidnappings and hostage situations and, in some cases, armed robberies.
Domestic terrorism consists of acts or attempted acts of terrorism in which the perpetrators are citizens or long-time residents of the United States and are not members or agents of foreign or international terrorist organizations. In all but one of the incidents in this report, the attack also occurred or was intended to take place on U.S. soil. The sole exception involved an American servicemember who plotted an attack on other American servicemembers overseas.
These definitions exclude acts of spontaneous, unplanned violence — such as an anti-government sovereign citizen becoming angry and shooting a police officer who pulled him or her over for a traffic stop — as well as mere threats, such as someone posting an online threat to burn down a mosque or synagogue.
This incident list compiled by the Center on Extremism is by design a conservative list. However, compilers of any such list must make decisions about including or excluding certain borderline cases and reasonable people may sometimes disagree with such decisions. This report also does not include terrorist incidents that occurred in 2022 but which were only revealed in 2023.
One incident on the list is particularly complicated: the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol. Over a thousand arrests have been made so far in connection with this event, including several sets of arrests of people charged with conspiracy or seditious conspiracy. These include cases involving the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and other militia groups. For simplicity’s sake, these serious cases are counted in this analysis as one combined incident rather than as separate incidents.
Many governmental and international bodies have devised their own definitions of terrorism, including the FBI, other federal and state governmental bodies and the United Nations.
Terror Over Time: A Troubling Resurgence
Terror incidents can vary considerably in number from one year to the next. Over longer spans of time, however, they highlight important broad trends in right-wing extremism. The patterns of 21st-century right-wing terrorism in the U.S. show a significant rise of terrorist incidents after a period of comparatively low activity in the early 2000s.
The history of right-wing extremism over the past 50 years has been fairly cyclical. A period of relatively low activity in the late 1970s ended with a significant resurgence of the far right in the early-to-mid 1980s, enabled in part by the major recession and farm crisis that occurred during these years. White supremacists, anti-government extremists and other far-right actors increased in numbers and activity, including violence and terrorism. By the end of the decade, the surge had passed.
The mid-to-late 1990s witnessed another major spike of right-wing extremism, propelled by a variety of causes, including deadly standoffs between the federal government and fringe groups or individuals at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993, that greatly inflamed the far right. This surge lasted until the end of the decade, after which there was a significant decline in the early 2000s, especially within the anti-government militia movement, one of the most active right-wing extremist movements of the 1990s.
However, a third surge of far-right extremism emerged in the late 2000s, characterized primarily by a revival of the militia movement and its sister anti-government extremist movement, the sovereign citizen movement. Factors spurring this resurgence included the election of Barack Obama following years of a conservative president, another major recession and a mortgage crisis comparable to the farm crisis of the 1980s. The rise of major social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube also played a substantial role in the spread of extremist ideas. The surge that started in 2008 primarily affected anti-government extremists rather than white supremacists, but in 2015 the rise of the alt right gave the white supremacist movement its own surge, bringing the largest influx of new recruits to the white supremacist movement in more than 20 years.
The Far-Right Threat Re-emerges
This one-two punch of a surge of right-wing anti-government extremism starting in 2008 followed by a surge of white supremacy beginning in 2015 helped create a steady rise of right-wing terrorism in the U.S. that has shown little sign of slowing down.
Significantly, the far right-surge of the 2010s did not fade away like the surges of the 1980s and 1990s; the number of terror incidents reflects this fact, consistently increasing from the late 2000s onward, reaching a high of 40 during the period 2020-2022.
Several factors have contributed to the high number of right-wing terror incidents over the course of the past dozen or so years, including:
- The staggered surges of anti-government extremism and white supremacy.
- The rise of new elements within both the anti-government extremist and white supremacist segments of the far right that each embraced violence as a tactic—specifically anti-government boogalooers and accelerationist white supremacists.
- The rise of other new forms of right-wing extremism, such as the incel subculture and the QAnon conspiracy movement,which have also produced significant violent plots and acts.
- Consistent anti-abortion terrorism throughout the period.
Deaths Over Time: A Steady Rise
As terror incidents have increased in the long-term, so have terrorism-related deaths. The singularly high-casualty event of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombingby Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols distorts patterns in the 1990s but, leaving that event aside, right-wing terror perpetrators killed an average of around four people per year during the period 1993-2001.
Those numbers dropped considerably in the early 2000s (with only five people killed by right-wing terrorists during the period 2002-2007) before starting a steady rise in the late 2000s that reached a peak during the period 2017-19 with 39 deaths before declining in 2020-22 to 19 deaths—still a high number. This significant increase in right-wing terror deaths is not merely a result of the surges of right-wing extremism that occurred during this time frame but also, as we will see, specifically due to the rise of white supremacist shooting sprees as a terrorist tactic.
As right-wing extremism recovered from its low ebb in the early-to-mid 2000s, the number of terrorist incidents associated with it increased, as well as the number of terrorism-related deaths, creating a slow but steady and worrisome increase that has persisted over much of the past 15 years, only receding slightly in the last three years, largely because of fewer mass shooting incidents in 2020-21.
These figures do not reflect the total number of people killed by right-wing extremism during these years, because extremists also commit murders, including ideological murders, in non-terror-related incidents, so the total number of people killed by right-wing extremists is always larger than the subset of those killed specifically in terror incidents; the Center on Extremism releases annual reports on extremist-related killings that provide more detailed information on this subject. However, terrorism is one of the main sources of deadly violence from right-wing extremists.
Right-Wing Terrorism, 2017-2022: Topping the Charts
The 67 far-right terrorist attacks, attempted attacks and plots and conspiracies from 2017-2022 represent by far the highest number of such incidents in the United States in any equivalent time span in the past 30 years. They mark an increase of nearly a third over the 51 incidents from 2011-2016, which was already high.
On a year-to-year basis from 2017 to 2022, there was more fluctuation, which is fairly common. From 11 incidents in 2017, numbers dropped significantly to only 6 in 2018 before rising to 10 in 2019 and a high of 17 in 2020. Incidents dropped to 13 in 2021 and to 10 in 2022 — a lower number but still tied for the fifth-highest total from 1993-2022. It should be noted that the date recorded here for several terrorist plots is the date of the arrest, because the clear start of the plot itself was not available in the public record.
When these numbers are broken down by type of right-wing extremist, the variation during the period becomes clearer. The comparatively lower totals in 2018 and 2019 are due primarily to the absence of anti-government extremist terror incidents during those years, which largely reflects the history of the militia movement during the Trump administration.
Since the 1990s, most terror incidents involving anti-government extremists have originated within the militia movement, a movement fueled by conspiracy theories and hostility towards the federal government. However, the evolution of that movement took a peculiar turn thanks to the political rise of Donald Trump. Historically hostile to mainstream candidates from either major party, the militia movement from 2015 onwards enthusiastically supported Donald Trump in his campaign for president, viewing him as an anti-establishment outsider willing to fight the “deep state.” The militia movement also supported conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments espoused by Trump (see The Militia Movement for details).
Militia adherents were jubilant when Trump won but his victory unexpectedly threw a wrench into the movement itself. The movement drew much of its energy from its antipathy to the federal government, but when Trump became the head of that very institution, the militia movement found much of its energy sapped while Trump was in office. In 2017, for example, two of the three militia-related terror incidents that year, both committed by the same group, focused on targets other than the federal government—a mosque and an abortion clinic. The next two years saw no militia-related incidents at all.
It was only in 2020 that the militia movement began to find traction again, through opposition to state-level anti-pandemic measures, hostility to antifa and Black Lives Matter (which militia adherents incorporated into their anti-leftist conspiracy theories) and acceptance of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Militia groups showed up at armed protests around the country throughout 2020, while some militia adherents contemplated more violent acts. The most serious militia terrorist incident of 2020 involved the arrest on state or federal charges of 14 militia adherents (five of whom, however, were subsequently acquitted, though most pleaded guilty or were convicted) in Michigan for a serious plot to kidnap the governor of that state, Gretchen Witmer — notably, a state official rather than federal one.
Despite this renewed violence from the militia movement, the real increase in anti-government terrorism in 2020 came from an entirely new movement — the boogaloo movement. The boogaloo movement is similar to the militia movement in many ways, but there are also distinct differences between them. Originating in online communities in the late 2010s, the boogalooers possessed the same love of firearms and military gear that the militia movement did but evinced an even more fervent hostility towards government, especially towards law enforcement, which the boogalooers viewed as a key enemy. Though the loosely organized boogalooers overlapped with the militia movement, boogaloo adherents, unlike their militia counterparts, had no particular affection for Donald Trump, nor any reason to moderate their hostility towards the federal government while he oversaw it.
Boogaloo adherents were responsible for four of the six anti-government terror incidents of 2020 (and were also involved in the plot to kidnap Governor Witmer). Some of these incidents were shocking, including a May 2020 shooting attack targeting security personnel outside a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, which killed one person and wounded another. One of the perpetrators of that attack subsequently shot and killed a sheriff’s sergeant as law enforcement attempted to arrest him. In September, two boogalooers in Minnesota — seeking financial assistance for their plans to attack targets that included politicians, the media, buildings and monuments and even a white supremacist group — actually conspired to provide material support to the Islamist terror group Hamas.
The violent appearance of the boogalooers triggered an aggressive federal response; over the next two years the FBI made multiple arrests of boogalooers, often on weapons-related charges. The negative publicity that resulted from their violence also led to the boogaloo movement being deplatformed from many of the online spaces — most notably Facebook — where it had organized. Together, the deplatforming and the law enforcement response significantly wounded the infant boogaloo movement and arrested its sharp growth. These blows to the boogalooers likely contributed to the movement’s decline after 2020 and thus help explain why anti-government extremist terror incidents declined once again following 2020.
In contrast to the ebbs and flows of anti-government extremist terrorism, white supremacists and anti-abortion extremists were far more consistent in their violence from 2017-2022, with white supremacists contributing between three and seven incidents each year and anti-abortion extremists typically adding one or two per year.
White supremacists were responsible for the highest number of terror incidents in four of the six years between 2017 and 2022. Overall, 30 (or 45%) of the 67 terror incidents during this period came from white supremacist perpetrators, compared to only 18 (27%) for anti-government extremists. In comparison, of 150 right-wing terror incidents tracked by the COE from 1993 to 2016, white supremacists and anti-government extremists were responsible for virtually the same number of acts (62 and 63, respectively). In other words, for most of the past 30 years, white supremacists and anti-government extremists represented roughly equivalent terror threats, but in recent years, white supremacists have noticeably surpassed anti-government extremists to become the most serious far right terrorist threat in the United States.
When one looks at the number of deaths caused by right-wing terrorist incidents rather than the number of incidents themselves, the danger of white supremacist violence becomes even more apparent. From 2017 to 2022, right-wing terror attacks killed 58 people in the United States (and wounded dozens more). Of the 58 dead, all but five (91%) were killed in white supremacist attacks.
Moreover, of the 53 people killed by white supremacists, all but three (94%) were killed in white supremacist shooting sprees specifically designed to cause mass casualties. Four incidents alone, each of which shocked the nation, killed 49 people: the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 (11), the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting targeting people of Mexican descent (23), the 2022 Buffalo supermarket shooting targeting Black people (10) and the shooting attack on the LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs that same year (5). The presence or absence of mass shootings was the main determinant in right-wing terror casualties for all years from 2017 to 2022.
The white supremacist mass shooting attacks in recent years are part of a concerning rise in extremist-related mass killings generally over the past 12 years, a phenomenon COE explored in detail in its recent report, Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022. The white supremacist attacks are also in large part the result of the rise of a phenomenon known as white supremacist accelerationism. While historically the white supremacist movement has been divided on the use of violence, as well as its application, in recent years a number of white supremacists, primarily from the alt right and neo-Nazi segments of the white supremacist movement, have wholeheartedly embraced violence as a solution. These accelerationists argue that white supremacists will never succeed in changing or reforming modern society into some sort of white supremacist ethnostate. The only real option is to destroy this society and build a new one, as desired, from the ashes of the old one. To this end, any sort of violence that could fracture and weaken society, especially if such violence is directed at perceived enemies, is a good thing. Consequently, accelerationist white supremacists openly promote acts of violence and terrorism. They glorify past white supremacist terrorists, such as the Australian Brenton Tarrant, who committed deadly shooting attacks at mosques in New Zealand in 2018 and urge others to follow in their footsteps — even to the point of creating manuals and videos providing guidance, instructions and encouragement. The El Paso, Buffalo and Colorado Springs attacks were all committed by people seemingly inspired by accelerationism, as was the attempted mass shooting in Poway, California, in 2018.
In addition to longstanding sources of right-wing terrorism in the U.S., such as white supremacy, anti-government extremism and anti-abortion extremism, newer movements and causes have also produced violent acts and plots that have pushed domestic terrorism totals higher in recent years. Most notable among these are the toxic masculinity subculture, particularly its incel segment, and the loose conspiracy movement known as QAnon.
The term incels refers to so-called “involuntary celibates,” a group of primarily younger males who experience great difficulty in forming meaningful romantic relations with women and who have turned their frustrations into a hateful, misogynistic ideology. Incels have been responsible for several shooting sprees over the past six years.
QAnon is a broad conspiratorial movement that originated during the Trump administration. It originally centered around the oracular and conspiratorial postings of an anonymous “Q,” who purported to be an intelligence insider, and related conspiracy theories that imagined Donald Trump as a heroic figure fighting a vast, evil pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent left-leaning figures. The first “Q drop,” or posting from “Q,” occurred in October 2017; within a month, a movement had formed around the drops. Over the past few years, QAnon has grown to incorporate other conspiratorial beliefs and to become somewhat more amorphous. The movement has demonstrated the ability to motivate some people, especially volatile or unbalanced people, to violence ranging from murders to terrorist incidents.
The Shape of Right-Wing Terror
The 67 right-wing terror incidents from 2017-2022 differ considerably in their nature, from incipient plots caught by law enforcement well before any violent act could be carried out to deadly shooting sprees causing numerous casualties. Many acts were plotted or committed by lone perpetrators, while others involved members of a cell or group working together. The range of targets was very broad, though the range of weapons used or considered was much narrower.
Overall, less than half of the 67 incidents (29 of 67, or 43%) could be considered “successful.” Success is defined here not as terrorists meeting their intended goals, which in some cases were quite unrealistic, but more modestly in terms of whether the perpetrators were able to cause harm to persons or property. So, for example, the attack by an anti-abortion extremist who intended to burn down a clinic but only succeeded in damaging it would still be considered a success. Most failures were caused by law enforcement stopping the perpetrator(s) before any act could be carried out. However, one failure occurred when a bomb set at an abortion clinic by a militia group failed to detonate; another failure happened when a white supremacist who intended to burn down a synagogue was deterred by security cameras on the scene and decided at the last minute to commit an act of vandalism instead.
The vast majority (48 of 67, or 72%) of incidents involved just a single perpetrator. Eight incidents had two perpetrators, while fewer still had more than two participants (see chart). The two incidents involving the most participants were the 2020 attempt by militia members to kidnap the governor of Michigan and the 2021 storming of the Capitol (combined into one incident for this report). Lone perpetrators were far more likely to succeed in causing harm than multiple perpetrators. The 48 lone perpetrators achieved a success rate of 52%, while incidents with more than one perpetrator succeeded in causing harm only 21% of the time (see chart). Lone perpetrators were also responsible for the deadliest attacks, which all came in the form of shooting sprees. Incidents involving multiple perpetrators were the easiest for law enforcement to detect and prevent.
Regardless of the number of perpetrators, most of the terror incidents were not committed by organized extremist groups acting as groups. Even when there was more than one perpetrator, the actors involved usually constituted a loose, informal cell. Though there is a general impression that terrorist acts are committed by “terrorist groups,” that is not the reality for most domestic terrorism in the United States. Extremist groups in the United States, unlike those in lawless or semi-lawless areas of the world, tend to play more of a radicalizing and propaganda role. Groups that embark upon campaigns of violence tend to be shut down quickly by law enforcement. The accelerationist neo-Nazi group The Base is a good example. Members of The Base were arrested for three different terrorist plots in 2020 (see list of incidents, below) as part of a broader crackdown by the federal government on violent white supremacist accelerationists. These and other Base-related arrests effectively destroyed The Base as a functioning extremist group.
The most popular weapon of choice in the right-wing terror incidents of 2017-2022 was the firearm. Firearms were used or chosen to be used as the weapon in 27 of the 67 incidents (40%). In two additional incidents, perpetrators used or planned to use firearms and another type of weapon (thermite in one case and explosives in the other). The second most common type of weapon was incendiary devices, featured in 17 incidents (25%). Explosives were the chosen weapon for 12 incidents (18%), but these incidents were rarely successful. In almost every case, plots involving bombs were stopped by law enforcement before they could be carried out. A rare exception was the August 2017 bombing of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, by members of a small Illinois-based militia group. Other weapons ranged from a hammer up all the way up to a train. In some incidents — typically cases where the perpetrator was caught early in the plotting stages — the intended weapon was unclear.
Firearms and incendiary devices are both easy to obtain and easy to use. Guns, even military-style assault weapons, are ubiquitous in the United States, and easy for most people to purchase, while incendiary devices can often be assembled from household items. Neither requires experience or training to use. It’s not a coincidence that firearms and incendiary devices were both more common and more likely to be successful than a weapon like a bomb, which must be safely constructed before it can even be used.
Those terror attacks that were successful caused a tremendous amount of harm, killing 58 people — all but one from firearm wounds — and wounding or injuring dozens more. These figures do not count police officers injured during the January 6, 2021, Capitol storming, which would add at least 130 more wounded/injured to the total. In addition, 16 properties were damaged or destroyed. Religious institutions and abortion clinics were the properties most likely to be damaged or destroyed.
As bad as these totals are, the actual harm was even greater, thanks to the very nature of terrorism. Terrorist incidents shocked and spread fear in the people across the towns and cities in which they occurred and, in the worst incidents, affected the entire country. Attacks directed against specific communities, such as the Black, Muslim or Jewish communities, caused suffering for the people of those communities no matter where they resided. Attacks or plots against law enforcement and the military threatened institutions dedicated to protecting all people.
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www.adl.org
A lot more about the dangers of the Far Right Terrorism in the above link!!
Both ultra right and ultra left/ pro Pali are disgusting.
Im checking. Breitbart and Al Jazeera from time to time and it’s like stepping into an outhouse. Smell of shit is so strong that my eyes tear.
That discussion was about 9/11 where I questioned the involvement of the Palestinians in that attack!!
Of course we have to denounce terrorism whether they are extreme right or ISIS, Al Quaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah, as well as Israel's indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and now more recently even The West Bank!!
Israel/OPT: New evidence of unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza causing mass civilian casualties amid real risk of genocide
New evidence of unlawful Israeli attacks in Rafah causing mass civilian casualties
Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.
www.amnesty.org
Isn’t amnesty one of the most anti israel organizations? Even according to their wiki page? Why would you trust it?Israel/OPT: New evidence of unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza causing mass civilian casualties amid real risk of genocide
New evidence of unlawful Israeli attacks in Rafah causing mass civilian casualties
Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.
Who do you want to believe, when over 41,000 civilians, including women and children, along with the Gaza infrastructure being practically raised to the ground?
First of all if you are quoting Hamas numbers they give a total number of combatants plus non combatants. Not just civilians.
and considering that IDF basically needs to storm an uunderground fortress worth billions of dollars and shielded with civilians it seems like very reasonable casualties.
Name a modern war where an army took greater care of not harming civilians.
