Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
Radical ideas that are today considered right-wing—white supremacism, violent anti government libertarianism, Christian extremism—have played starring roles in the American story since the very beginning. For most of the postwar era, however, the far right has mostly stayed underground, relegated to the fringes of American society. It never disappeared, of course, and in the early 1990s, it seemed poised for a resurgence after a series of confrontations that pitted the authorities against antigovernment militias and religious extremists—a phase that peaked with the 1995 terrorist bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City by a white supremacist, anti government extremist, which killed 168 people.
Fast-forward two decades, and the picture looks very different. The past few years have witnessed an explosion of far-right violence and the normalization of the extremist ideas that drive it. In the United States in 2019, 48 people were killed in attacks carried out by domestic violent extremists, 39 of which were carried out white supremacists, making it the most lethal year for such terrorism in the country since 1995.
In 2020, the number of domestic terrorist plots and attacks in the United States reached its highest level since 1994; two-thirds of those were attributable to white supremacists and other far-right extremists. In March of this year, the FBI had more than 2,000 open investigations into domestic violent extremism, roughly double the number it had open in the summer of 2017.
Donald Trump’s electoral success was both a cause and an effect of this trend. His 2016 presidential campaign and his tenure in the White House were steeped in populist, nationalist, nativist rhetoric, which the far right perceived as a legitimation of their views.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/war-on-terror-911-jan6
Fast-forward two decades, and the picture looks very different. The past few years have witnessed an explosion of far-right violence and the normalization of the extremist ideas that drive it. In the United States in 2019, 48 people were killed in attacks carried out by domestic violent extremists, 39 of which were carried out white supremacists, making it the most lethal year for such terrorism in the country since 1995.
In 2020, the number of domestic terrorist plots and attacks in the United States reached its highest level since 1994; two-thirds of those were attributable to white supremacists and other far-right extremists. In March of this year, the FBI had more than 2,000 open investigations into domestic violent extremism, roughly double the number it had open in the summer of 2017.
Donald Trump’s electoral success was both a cause and an effect of this trend. His 2016 presidential campaign and his tenure in the White House were steeped in populist, nationalist, nativist rhetoric, which the far right perceived as a legitimation of their views.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/war-on-terror-911-jan6