Biden: ‘The Most Dangerous Terrorist Threat to Our Homeland Is White Supremacy’
Increasingly, violence in the United States is tied to white supremacy, white nationalism
President Biden identified white supremacy as “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland,” a declaration which also is rooted with increasing data to back it up.
Biden made his statement Saturday, speaking at commencement at Howard University in Washington DC, a prominent historically Black college or university (HBCU), which also granted Biden an honorary doctorate.
“We know that American history has not always been a fairytale,” the president said. “From the start, it's been a constant push-and-pull, for more than 240 years, between the best of us — and the American ideal that we're all created equal — and the worst of us and the harsh reality that racism has long torn us apart.
“It’s a battle that's never really over. But, on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the heart to stand up for the best of us: To choose love over hate, unity over disunion, progress over retreat, to stand up against the poison of white supremacy,” he added. “… The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. And I'm not saying this because I'm at a Black HBCU; I say it wherever I go.”
Evidence increasingly backs up Biden's claim, from the number of mass shootings which have racism and white supremacy as a motive — such as the murders a year ago at a grocery store in Buffalo NY in which 10 people, all of whom were Black, were murdered — to the growing prominence of white nationalist militant groups.
“The threat is large,” said Pete Simi, a professor at Chapman University who testified at a trial that led to a $26 million verdict against organizers of the 2017 racist rally in Charlottesville, Va. “It's been large for a long time. And the near future poses a lot of risk.”
Some 40 percent of Christian nationalism adherents agree with this statement about patriots resorting to violence to save the United States: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
According to a recent report by the Washington DC think tank Brookings Institution:
This social acceptance of violence and the patriot-identity many Christian nationalist are taking on reflect two historical moments. The first, suggests Christian nationalists want to mirror the spread of Christianity through holy wars. The second moment suggests that Christian nationalists want to use violence to intimidate Black communities and other communities of color similar to tactics used during the Jim Crow Era and to interfere with the Modern Civil Rights Movement.
Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports a dramatic increase in the number of white nationalist groups in the United States while the Anti-Defamation League reports a 182 percent increase in incidents of the distribution of white supremacist propaganda, and an increase in the number of rallies and demonstrations by white supremacy groups.
And study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found the number of terrorist attacks by far-right perpetrators quadrupled in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017 alone, and that far-right attacks in Europe rose 43 percent over the same period.
Among those incidents, CSIS said, the rise of attacks by white supremacists and anti-government extremists is “of particular concern.”
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