Trump Cabinet pick raises alarm on unchecked domestic terrorism
This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI means for the agency's ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots. Read Part 1 here.
In August 2019, a 21-year-old white man named Patrick Crusius drove 650 miles to El Paso, Texas, walked into a Walmart with a rifle and opened fire, killing 23 people in an attack that deliberately targeted Hispanics.
The El Paso massacre made 2019 the deadliest year for domestic violent extremism since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Crusius clearly stated in a manifesto that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using language that directly echoed President Donald Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections describing a migrant caravan as “an invasion.”
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So devastating was the attack that Trump, not typically one to acknowledge right-wing extremism, was compelled to tell the nation during an address from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”
The president added: “We must shine a light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start.”
Beyond the president’s words, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — the two federal agencies most responsible for addressing domestic terrorism — seemed to get serious about white supremacist violence.
Mixed record on handling white supremacist terror
The Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, released in September 2019, observed that “white supremacist violent extremism… is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” while noting that deaths caused by domestic terrorists had eclipsed those caused by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Five days before a Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Va. in January 2020 that received President Trump’s endorsement, the FBI arrested three men in Maryland who were members of the Base, an accelerationist group that promoted insurrectionary violence as a first step towards creating a whites-only homeland. According to court documents, the three men, who included a Canadian national, acquired 150 rounds of ammunition and trained at a Maryland gun range.
While planning to attend the Richmond rally, two of the men allegedly discussed conducting ambushes against police officers and unsuspecting civilians. One of them mused that “Virginia can spiral out to f---ing full-blown civil war,” while another fantasized that “if there’s like a po-po cruiser parked on the street and he doesn’t have a backup, I can execute him at a whim and just take his stuff.”
The three men eventually pled guilty to federal firearms charges and received sentences ranging from five to nine years in prison.
But the decisive manner in which the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security moved to combat violent extremism during the final years of his Trump’s first administration gives some reason for cautious optimism that they’ll be able to continue to do that work during the next administration — even as the president-elect pours rhetorical fuel on the fire.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told Raw Story that the federal government’s pivot towards addressing the threat of white supremacist terrorism under the first Trump administration suggests that it is still viewed as a “bipartisan national security issue.”
“No matter what party they’re in, no president wants to see a massive terrorist attack on their watch,” she said.
Others are not so sure the field agents devoted to disrupting accelerationist terror plots will remain unscathed by politicization of the bureau.
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story that it’s a safe bet that agents involved in the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election will face the most intense scrutiny.
“But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that’s where it stops,” he added.
While the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security ramped up their efforts to disrupt violent white supremacists in 2019 and 2020, the final two years of the first Trump administration also showed how domestic terrorism could be politicized.
Elizabeth Neuman, who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security, has said that officials in the Trump administration didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism” after the 2019 El Paso massacre. But when left-wing protests, some of which turned violent, erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr said: “The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.”
Assuming Trump carries through on his promise to initiate widescale deportations when he takes office in January, Lewis said the response from federal law enforcement will bear scrutiny.
“At a strategic level, the concern would be around resourcing if there’s a massive shift away from the domestic [terrorism] desks and a reprioritization to anarchists or environmental activists, where every left-wing threat against an ICE facility was viewed as terrorism,” Lewis said.
Despite clear evidence of the persistent threat of white supremacist violence and the FBI’s track record of aggressively disrupting terror plots over the past five years, it remains to be seen whether Trump will continue to support the agency’s counterterrorism focus when he returns to the White House.
Trump said little or nothing during the 2024 campaign about whether he views white supremacist domestic terrorism as a problem. Meanwhile, he and his allies have obsessively focused on their grievances against FBI investigations targeting Trump and supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Trump transition team and Kash Patel, whom the president-elect announced will lead the FBI, did not return messages for this story.
The emergence of Terrorgram
The white supremacist domestic terror threat didn’t end when the FBI dismantled the Base in 2020, or, for that matter, when Trump left the White House in January 2021. The El Paso massacre and an earlier, even deadlier attack — when a 28-year-old Australian national named Brenton Tarrant gunned down 51 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019 — exemplified the kind of terror plots the FBI would scramble to disrupt during the Biden era.
The new threat would come not from groups, but from lone actors loosely networked through the internet and goaded into action by online propaganda.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security officially acknowledged accelerationism as a driver of domestic terrorism for the first time in May 2021.
“Themes like ‘gamification’ and ‘accelerationism’ partly inspired some of the attacks in 2019 and will likely continue to inspire future plots,” the two agencies said in their jointly issued Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism document. “Widely disseminated propaganda on online forums and encrypted chat applications that espouse similar themes regarding kill counts could inspire future attackers to mobilize faster or attempt increasingly lethal and more sophisticated attacks.”
The assessment included a definition of accelerationism: “a belief among some neo-Nazi and/or fascist RMVEs that the current system is irreparable, without apparent political solutions, and hence violent action is needed to precipitate societal collapse and start a race war.”
Fears among counterterrorism officials about recurring white supremacist violence driven by online propaganda and obsession with “kill counts” turned out to be warranted.
In May 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron drove three and a half hours from his home in Conklin, N.Y. and walked into a grocery store on the east of Buffalo, where he opened fire and killed 10 people, almost all of them African Americans. Gendron issued a manifesto that cited Tarrant as an inspiration.
The pattern would repeat more than a year later, in August 2023, when a 21-year-old man named Ryan Palmeter fatally shot three Black people at a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, Fla. Palmeter, like Gendron, praised Tarrant as an exemplar.
Following the Buffalo massacre, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would observe “a significant shift in some of the [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists’] coordinated efforts to spread overtly violent and racist propaganda within encrypted chat applications, specifically to encourage others to engage in violence.”
The online propaganda referenced in the agencies’ most recent joint assessment appears to be the Terrorgram Collective, a loose network that produces and distributes digital publications that provide detailed instructions for carrying out mass shootings and energy grid attacks, while extolling racist mass murderers as “saints.”
Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Robert Allison, the two alleged leaders of Terrorgram, were arrested in September 2024 and charged with multiple felonies, including conspiracy and soliciting hate crimes, which could garner each of them up to 220 years in prison.
For every Payton Gendron who successfully carries out a lethal mass shooting, there are likely a dozen more plots targeting African Americans, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that the FBI disrupts — almost always by using informants.
The FBI has demonstrated an increasingly “nuanced understanding of the threat” posed by neo-Nazi accelerationists, Lewis, the research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story.
“These agents have their finger on the pulse, no question,” he said.
The FBI arrested Kyle Christopher Benton, a 26-year-old resident of Snohomish, Wash. on Sept. 6 for illegal possession of a machine gun. According to the government, Benton had been arrested for domestic violence while serving in the U.S. Army in 2019. Witnesses interviewed for that case revealed that Benton expressed admiration for Tarrant and talked about a fantasy of getting in a shootout with federal law enforcement agents. He had also allegedly “communicated with another person about the idea of killing a homeless person to see how it would feel.”
For years, the government said, Benton had expressed support for accelerationism, and in 2021 he told an informant that he supported an initiative to create a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest. When Gendron opened fire in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, Benton allegedly told an acquaintance in a private Instagram message: “Today has been another glorious entry into the annals of Aryan Terror. The harder the jew system presses back, the more the Aryan Will shall be unleashed to wreak havoc and death upon the hordes of our racial and spiritual adversaries.”
In August 2024, according to the government, Benton posted on the encrypted app Telegram that he was “going into random chats and hyping up saints," adding that he "might get some weirdo to become a saint because he knows people will love him.” Around the same time, the government said, Benton posted a video of himself firing a fully automatic firearm.
The Benton case illustrates the dilemma faced by FBI agents who are answering the charge given by then-President Trump in 2019 to “stop mass murders before they start.”
“There’s no charge for a neo-Nazi who’s talking about committing a mass shooting or taking overt steps to carry out a mass shooting,” Lewis told Raw Story. “Until he’s at the synagogue door, there are precious few options for the FBI other than the low-level charges like possessing an illegal machine gun.
“That’s just to take them off the playing field,” Lewis continued. “When you look at how these cases evolve, you’ve certainly seen the FBI responding to the conditions as they are — the legal conditions and the conditions on the ground.”
No matter how stark the evidence, if law enforcement makes an arrest before and not after the attack, the question of whether the violence is an actual plot or just someone’s fevered imagination often comes down to the discretion of a federal judge.
Noah Edwin Anthony, a 23-year-old soldier, was stopped during a random vehicle inspection while entering Fort Liberty in North Carolina in March 2022. Military police found a ghost gun, ammunition and a patch with an American flag altered to display a Nazi swastika in place of the stars.
Later, when police searched Anthony’s barracks, they discovered a military-style operational document entitled “Top Secret Goebbels” that described a “premeditated plan to physically remove as many of the” Black, Hispanic and mixed-race people from the four counties surrounding Fort Liberty “by whatever means need be.”
The document outlined a litany of methods, including ricin poisoning, arson and shooting, while naming “minority businesses, meeting places and neighborhoods” as targets.
“There are members of the government that believe that but for the actions of that gate guard at Fort Liberty, we could have very well seen a mass casualty event in the Eastern District of North Carolina,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gabriel Diaz told the court during Anthony’s sentencing in March 2024.
Diaz argued that a prison sentence of three years and four months was necessary to deter violence and protect the public.
But when Anthony stood before the judge, he received only 18 months — the lowest sentence in the guideline range.
“My job is to protect the public from further crime by the defendant,” Judge Richard E. Myers II, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump, told Anthony. “If Mr. Diaz is right that there is a genuine risk going forward, then shame be on this judge. Right? If you go out and hurt somebody, I have failed. And believe me, I think about that.”
This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI mean for the agencies ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.. Read Part 1 here.