When we visit Arizona each winter, we always connect with Arizona State University (‘ASU’) because they have so many programs to which they invite the public—like us. Not just scholars, but ordinary people like us. We have found many of them fascinating. This year the first one we watched we watched online as it was not offered live. It was called God, Guns, and Sedition. The title caught my eye.
Shocking acts of terrorism across the country have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including, among many incidents, the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Sadly, however these incidents, however, are neither new nor unprecedented, but are common. Frankly, they happen all the time.
One of these events, a mass shooting, happened about an hour by car from where we are staying here in Arizona. On January 8, 2011, Gabrielle Dee Giffords who at the time was serving as a member of the United States House of Representatives. She was a member of the Democratic Party representing the 8th congressional district. She was shot in the head outside a Safeway Grocery store in suburban area outside of Tucson, by a man who ran up to a crowd of people participating in a political event and fired his 99mm pistol with a 33-round magazine. His bullets hit 19 people killing 6 of them.
The speakers at the ASU event were Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware who are leading experts on domestic terrorism in the US. In their book God, Guns, and Sedition In that book they provide a brief synoptic history highlighting developments including the use of cutting-edge communications technology; the embrace of leaderless resistance or lone actor strategies; the emergence of characteristic tactics and targets; infiltration and recruitment in the military and law enforcement; and the far right’s intricate relationship with mainstream politics. The history of domestic terrorism is what interested me the most.
This is what these two extremely knowledgeable intellectuals talked about in the ASU program. Bruce Hoffman professor emeritus of terrorism at St Andrews University and has written a number of books on terrorism. Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. The moderator was Peter Bergen another expert in the field and a professor at ASU. In addition to being a professor at ASU he is also the Co-Director of the Future Security Initiative, at ASU. The first question they answered was, ‘Why is a book on far-right terrorism at this time?”
Professor Bruce Hoffman, made it clear there also many other terrorist threats facing America today. He insists it was not a partisan choice that they focused on the far-right out of all those choices. Although there are left-wing terrorists in the US as well, they are greatly outnumbered by those on the far-right. He also acknowledged that one of the most significant terrorist events from recent years occurred in June of 2017 by someone on the far left who claimed to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders a well-known left wing politician and Senator in the United States. This was the event where he attacked several members of Congress who were practicing for an annual Congressional baseball tournament. He seriously wounded 5 members of Congress.
According to Hoffman it is just “that the numbers on the far right completely eclipse the threats from the far left as well as other actors. Cynthia Miller-Idriss Professor, School of Public Affairs and School of Education Department of Justice, Law and Criminology and a recognized expert on violent extremism in the United States “put the number of armed far-right extremists at an estimated 75,000 persons. Needless to say, that is a lot of violent extremists.
A few years ago, the New York Times put the number of armed members of militia movements at 20,000. Many of the violent extremists come from that pool. Added to that if you read the FBI reports it is easy to see where the overwhelming majority of threats come from—i.e. the far-right not the far left or any other group including Jihadis, Antifa, eco-terrorists, indigenous groups, or any others. The far-right is the main reservoir for terrorism in America. Unfortunately, many on the less extreme right-wing in America are blind to this uncomfortable fact.
Hoffman reported,
“In 2019 for example the FBI had 850 active domestic terror investigations. That number doubled in 2020. It tripled in 2022…that includes 3 big buckets: racially motivated violent extremists, home grown violent extremists of both the left and the right, and others such as INCEL, eco-terrorists, animal rights people, militant anti-abortion. But even within those figures the overwhelming majority of the current over 2,000 investigations, are the violent far-right extremists.”
There is no domestic terrorism statute in the US just like there is none in Canada. As a result, scholars like Hoffman and Ware have to rely on non-governmental organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (‘ADL’) and Southern Poverty Law Center for figures. Although the numbers are not yet available for 2023 , according to the ADF, all 25 of the extremist related murders in about a dozen incidents in 2023 were linked to violent far right extremists and according to Hoffman of that number , “of that number 95% were committed by white supremacists or white nationalists.” Hoffman also said, “this is part of a decades long trend that the ADL has followed. Since 2012 75% of the people who have been killed were killed by far-right extremists and of that number 73% were killed by white supremacists.
I am frequently bothered by right-winger complaining about extremists on the left without mentioning that there are vastly more extremists on the right. It is difficult to call out people who look like us as extremists. After all, we are the good guys.