Around 2018 the F.B.I. began seeing an increase in racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists—in particular, “individuals espousing the superiority of the white race.” By 2021, the agency had more than doubled the number of analysts at its headquarters who focused primarily on domestic violent extremism.
The strategy has focused on prevention, the New Yorker reports, especially on enlisting local authorities and the public to look out for telltale signs that an individual—on either the left or the right—was moving toward extremist violence. Federal law-enforcement agencies distributed forty thousand copies of a previously published booklet enumerating “violent extremism mobilization indicators,” including “disseminating one’s own martyrdom or last will video or statement” and “conducting a dry run of an attack or assault.”
But F.B.I. officials said that the agency’s fundamental approach to the problem “didn’t change” under the Biden Administration.
In fact, the officials said, the First Amendment meant that there was little more that law enforcement could do to stop extremist violence. One of the officials said that respecting constitutional rights is “probably the hardest part of the job on the domestic-terrorism front,” in part because it requires understanding that “rhetoric and intent are two different things.” Glorifying violence against a minority—even wishing aloud for it—is free speech: “Only when that moves to, say, plotting to kill Jewish people and planning to burn down a synagogue—that is when the F.B.I. can open an investigation.”
The U.S. designates numerous foreign organizations, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, as terrorists, and many other countries, including the U.K., ban domestic groups that promote or glorify terrorism. Canada and New Zealand both classify the U.S. right-wing group Proud Boys as a terrorist organization. But the First Amendment precludes criminalizing support for any domestic political group—even the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the F.B.I. maintains that it focuses on individual offenders, not on the groups to which they may belong.
The F.B.I., which has worked to protect Americans from extremist violence since the nineteen-twenties, when it took on the Ku Klux Klan, has warned of a resurgence of the far right. Near the end of Trump’s term in office, the Department of Homeland Security declared for the first time that domestic violent extremists, rather than foreign terrorists, were “the most persistent and lethal threat” to the nation, primarily in the form of “lone offenders and small groups.”
A growing number of far-left vigilantes are also attempting to infiltrate far-right groups, experts say.
“Part of the complexity of today’s Internet-driven threat environment is that law enforcement doesn’t have a monopoly on intelligence gathering anymore,” said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York Police Department. Amateur spies have become common enough that they pose “operational challenges.”
“Government agencies collecting human intelligence have systems to deconflict with each other, but it muddies the waters considerably when you have civilians impersonating bad guys,” she said.
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