On Monday, an attorney representing
Patrick Eugene Stein, one of three men convicted of plotting to bomb Somali refugees, filed an explosive memo in U.S. District Court in Kansas. Stein, his lawyer argued, should receive a more lenient sentence because he was inspired by then-candidate
Donald Trump. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful, and contentious presidential elections in modern history,” attorney
Jim Pratt wrote, “driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president.”
The filing
made national news in part because Pratt was willing to argue publicly what many in Washington are saying in private. In the past weeks, the United States has been rocked by a series of vicious hate crimes, including a mail-bombing spree targeting Democrats and Trump critics; the racially inspired killing of two black patrons at a Kentucky grocery store; and, most recently, the massacre of 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue believed to be the work of an avowed neo-Nazi. Trump and his allies have argued that the president bears no responsibility for the acts of deranged individuals. But to many experts on hate groups and former Homeland Security, law enforcement, and counterterrorism officials, there is unquestionably a correlation. “I think it’s laughable that people are trying to separate the two things in saying there is no relationship between what the president urges his supporters to do and what his supporters then do,”
Glenn Kirschner, a former federal homicide prosecutor, told me. “A fourth-grader could see the connection. . . . Anybody who says there is no connection, I think is saying it for political or ideological reasons.”
The Trump administration has done little to counter the impression that it is soft on right-wing extremism. Even before Trump took office, his presidential transition team began drawing up plans to redirect national-security resources away from white supremacists to
focus solely on Islamic terrorism. The main target of this effort was Countering Violent Extremism, an interagency task force created by
Barack Obama in the wake of the Charleston Church shooting to help prevent acts of violence before they happen. In 2016, the Office of Community Partnerships, which housed C.V.E., boasted a full-time staff of 16, about 25 contractors, and a budget of $21 million. But the Trump White House was skeptical of the preventative approach. While the Anti-Defamation League estimates that white supremacists have committed 83 percent of extremist-related murders in the U.S. over the past decade, the administration wanted to keep the focus on radical Islamist groups. In 2018, the Office of Community Partnerships’ budget was slashed to less than $3 million and its headcount cut to eight. “Effectively, it no longer exists,” a former D.H.S. official told me, describing a “shift” away from “a comprehensive approach” to preventing radicalization and recruitment. “There were a number of new political appointees in the Trump administration who were not fully on board with the approach of the previous administration,” the former official said. “They didn’t want to understand it and some of them just blatantly disagreed with it.” (D.H.S. did not respond to a request for comment.)
Other sources I spoke with specifically identified
Katharine Gorka, the wife of former Trump adviser
Sebastian Gorka, as a driving figure behind efforts to de-prioritize white supremacist violence. Although Mr. Gorka was
forced out of the White House in August 2017, Mrs. Gorka remains a full-time adviser for
Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of Homeland Security, where she has
reportedly played a critical role in shaping the administration’s counterterrorism agenda, including drafting reports to Congress on terrorism recruitment. Like her husband, Mrs. Gorka has been vocal in her criticism of Islam, reportedly
raising concerns inside D.H.S. that their influence would mean fewer resources for combatting right-wing extremism. (A spokesperson for D.H.S. previously
denied that Katharine Gorka is “pushing the department toward an Islamist-only approach to terrorism,” insisting that she champions “an all-forms-of-extremism approach.”)
Nate Snyder, a former senior D.H.S. counterterrorism official who served on the C.V.E. task force, described a pattern of neglect under Trump. “There’s a whole sort of rash of things stemming from the transition period between administrations to where there were deliberate decisions made to really not only hamstring the countering violent extremism efforts but to systematically de-fang it,” he told me. “It’s there in symbolic form right now for the most part, and there’s some good people who are there still struggling to keep the lights on.” But as Snyder noted, the vacancy left by former Office of Community Partnerships director
George Selim has yet to be filled. “The administration’s M.O. is more focused on destroying, systematically, by a thousand paper cuts.”
The C.V.E. was hardly a shining success within the Obama administration. It was still in its infancy at the end of Obama’s second term, and critics accused it of
stigmatizing American Muslim communities. Perhaps more important, insiders noted that there are several other government agencies focused on violent extremism. According to an F.B.I. spokesperson, the bureau is currently investigating around 1,000 cases of domestic terrorism. At its core, however, C.V.E. represented an effort to prevent radicalization through engagement with community-based programs, as opposed to simply hunting down extremists after they committed crimes—an approach the Trump administration has effectively given up. “When I talk to my friends in the national security division of the Department of Justice or even at D.H.S. or at U.S. attorney’s offices across the country, they are seeing an uptick in far-right extremism and they are going after it,” a second former D.H.S. official told me. “It is not like they are not. I think the difference is, there is no extra effort being put forth to building a prevention space.”
De-radicalization is arguably a more pressing issue than ever. Over the past decade there has been
a spike in right-wing extremist activity and in 2016, hate crimes
reached their highest mark since 2012. “Over the course of the past several years, there’s been a normalization, if you will, of hate speech or extremism both online and offline,” Selim, who is now the senior vice president of programs at the Anti-Defamation League, told me. “The combination of the an uptick of extremist and anti-Semitic rhetoric that has now been mainstreamed, with the mainstreaming of hate and extremism as part of our political discourse, coupled with some the technical capability social media savvy, allows for these haters and bigots to better connect and organize online. This recipe has created this very combustible mix across America.”
Complicating matters, officials say, is Trump’s hate-fueled commentary about migrants, Muslims, and
George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor loathed by anti-Semites. “You are adding fuel to the fire,” the second former official said. “We are at a turning point where a lot of the fringe groups think that their views are becoming mainstream, so we see these types of manifestations like you did last week.”
Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, was even more blunt. “You have hate emanating from the highest official in the land,” she told me. “It’s one thing when you have white supremacists saying these terrible things on their own to each other, or even trying to propagandize, and it’s a far different situation when they have the sanction of the highest office and, frankly, other folks in the G.O.P. who are parroting those ideas.”
The violent fringe of right-wing politics is indeed creeping into the mainstream. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year was billed by its organizers as a “coming out” of sorts for proud white nationalists. Republican Congressman
Steve King, who has espoused racist talking points in the past, has grown increasingly vocal in his view that nonwhite immigrants are destroying Western culture. Nor is he the only politician echoing language that was once carefully filtered through rhetorical dog-whistles. In the 2018 election cycle, the Anti-Defamation League
identified more than a dozen candidates for political office with “problematic views” ranging from white nationalist sympathies to outright anti-Semitism.
Though the White House is eager to shift the blame, experts say Trump is driving the political realignment that has brought the far right-wing out of the shadows. “It doesn’t matter what the president’s intention is. It is how it is perceived by the general populous and the far fringes,” said
Daryl Johnson, a former D.H.S. analyst, citing the president’s use of racially loaded terms such as “invaders” and “nationalist,” and his more controversial policy platforms, such as revoking birthright citizenship and banning Muslim immigrants. “When he flirts with that stuff and puts that stuff out, it is emboldening those who believe in the even more fringe conspiracy theories. Because he is seen as the highest government position in the land and he is endorsing these things,” Johnson told me. “These are all extremist messages that I saw on Stormfront and other white supremacist message boards 10 or 15 years ago, and now they are being endorsed as policy by the president.”
Where that leaves law-enforcement agents seeking to combat violent extremism is unclear. “It is not just that the president isn’t interested in this issue, it is that the president is actively supporting and amplifying the harm that is occurring,” said
Juliette Kayyem, a former D.H.S. official in the Obama administration. “There will be opportunities for there to be investigations and policies and stuff, but none of them will be as successful as they would otherwise be because of the president’s stance on this issue.”
Johnson, perhaps more than any sources I spoke to, is familiar with the dangers of allowing white nationalist grievances to fester. While he was still working at the Department of Homeland Security, he was the chief author of a 2009 report that predicted a spike in right-wing extremism would follow the election of Barack Obama. When the report was leaked, the conservative-media apparatus devolved into hysterics, claiming that the report exposed an Obama administration
plot to spy on its political opponents. “Up until that time, the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts were almost exclusively focused on al-Qaeda,” Johnson explained. “It was basically a warning to law enforcement, state and local and federal, that we were likely to see a rise in violent activities and terrorism attributed to white supremacists and militia extremists, sovereign citizens, and even anti-abortion extremists.” But Johnson never predicted Donald Trump. Now, he says, the U.S. government is seeing that same trend on steroids. “It is a lot bigger problem than we envisioned back in ‘09, and I didn’t expect it to last almost a decade.”
@Ted Williams' head is a douche doesn't mean that all conservatives are douches. 
