Trump Administration Abandoning Efforts to Combat White Supremacist and Far-Right Terrorism

Trump Administration Abandoning Efforts to Combat White Supremacist and Far-Right Terrorism and Violence

Since Trump returned to office in January, several government programs to combat domestic terrorism from white supremacists, militias, and other radicalized far-right extremists have been curtailed or abandoned.

Since Trump returned to office in January, several government programs to combat domestic terrorism from white supremacists, militias, and other radicalized far-right extremists have been curtailed or abandoned. Public safety, civil liberties, and national security will suffer.

the Trump administration seems not only unconcerned, but determined to deny the existence of violent far-right extremism and brush off any harmful acts. In addition to letting off criminals convicted of violent offenses with pardons and commutations, the administration is abandoning a broad range of efforts to keep Americans safe from far-right violence. These include efforts to identify and possibly expel extremists from the military; cutting DHS’s civil liberties and other staff; refocusing the FBI away from white supremacists and towards Black Lives Matter, “Antifa” and Tesla vandals; firing, demoting or reassigning prosecutors and agents focused on this threat across the departments; and gutting DHS prevention and protection programs. Even more alarming is the fact that the effort to protect Americans from domestic terrorists is now in the hands of Trump appointees with known connections to white supremacists and conspiracy movements.

The data on the threat posed by the far right doesn’t lie. Far-right extremists have been a rising threat to Americans over the past half decade. A February 2023 Government Accountability Office report found the FBI tallied 9,049 such cases in 2021, up from 5,557 in 2020

This is all part and parcel of the far-right campaign to rewrite recent history that includes glossing over the Jan. 6 Capitol attack on our democracy, downplaying the threat posed by white supremacists, and claiming groups like “antifa” are the true threat–greater than white supremacists who have killed dozens in terrorist attacks at synagogues, mosques, Walmart, and grocery stores.

About a month after Trump returned to the White House, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) Global Extremist Symbols Database, the largest available with nearly 1,000 such symbols from around the world, disappeared from the Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL). The library, run by FEMA as part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was filled with information critical, according to the website, to government officials at the federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels, as well as the U.S.
military.

Even more alarming is the fact that the effort to protect Americans from domestic terrorists is now in the hands of Trump appointees with known connections to white supremacists and conspiracy movements. President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the National Counterterrorism Center has ties to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

The FBI is shifting away from far-right extremism.
Kash Patel, now head of the agency, has been gutting the ranks of those who worked on the January 6 prosecutions and those who have expertise in far-right extremism.

Patel’s support of Jan 6ers including the promotion of a song by the January 6 “choir” of insurrectionists.

Patel has courted QAnon adherents, a conspiracy movement the FBI has identified as a domestic terrorism threat. Far from maintaining professional distance, Patel has woven himself into that conspiracy’s community. Patel’s children’s books arrive autographed with “WWG1WGA”—the QAnon slogan meaning “Where We Go One, We Go All.” His Truth Social posts have actively promoted Q-affiliated accounts.


https://globalextremism.org/post/trump-abandoning-efforts-to-combat-white-supremacist/