Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.
Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy-monger and MAGA propagandist, announced on his Election Day show that it was “doomsday for the globalists.” But he warned his listeners to be on the lookout for false flag attacks calculated to try to spoil candidate Donald Trump’s victory.
“And now, we’re beginning to see the signs,” Jones said. “But this, too, will fail. No one’s gonna buy it.”
His voice dripping with mockery, Jones said: “And then we’ve got the white supremacist — handled and run by the FBI, they built him the bomb, controlled him, were his leaders, they admit in the arrest documents and the press release.
“They’ve been telling you, ‘Oh, the white supremacist Trump supporters are going to blow up the power stations.’ Boom,” Jones continued. “Or do they just say it enough and loons go, ‘Oh yeah that’s a good idea!’ I mean, either way, they’re putting it out there.”
Law enforcement agents arrested 24-year-old Skyler Philippi on Nov. 2 as he powered up a drone and prepared to attach explosives to it while sitting in the back of an SUV. He had been planning to fly the drone into a nearby electrical substation in Nashville, Tenn., according to a federal complaint.
A drifter who had bounced from his hometown in Minnesota to the New Hampshire woods, and then to a Nazi “hate house” in Louisville, Ky., Philippi was living in Middle Tennessee by the summer of 2024. By then, according to the charging document, Philippi was talking to an FBI informant to whom he had confided that he wanted to commit a mass shooting at a YMCA.
This person put Philippi in contact with a second informant who lived close enough so that the two could meet in person. According to the charging document, Philippi mentioned his interest in carrying out an attack on an electrical substation that would “shock the system” and talked about accelerationism, a strain of white supremacist ideology that advocates hastening the collapse of society to lay the groundwork for a whites-only homeland.
“If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis,” Philippi allegedly texted the second informant.
Philippi’s arrest, which Jones dismissed as a “false flag alert” on his X account on Election Day, is only the most recent of at least half a dozen arrests by the FBI of accelerationists motivated by hatred of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that Raw Story has tracked over the past year. The defendants are accused of planning infrastructure attacks, mass shootings and ambushes against law enforcement.
The arrests, including the two alleged leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, described by the FBI as “a transnational terrorist group,” reflect the agency’s aggressive and increasingly sophisticated effort — often using informants — to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.
“Protecting the American people from terrorism — both international and domestic — is the FBI’s top priority,” the FBI said in a statement to Raw Story. “In 2019, we elevated racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism to be the one of our top threat priorities and it has remained at that level.”
Alex Jones’ dismissal of the foiled Nashville substation attack as an FBI “false flag” represents a larger tendency within the MAGA movement to reflexively downplay domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy, just as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House and is reportedly preparing to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris raised domestic terrorism as a significant issue during the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies relentlessly attacked the FBI and Department of Justice as the “Deep State” while promising to carry out retribution against officials involved in the multiple investigations against him and supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist Trump has announced as his pick for FBI director, previously served as chief of staff for the Department of Defense during the incoming president's first term and led a probe of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Trump and Patel have given little indication of whether he will support the FBI’s campaign to combat domestic terrorism, which has assessed violent extremism driven by a belief in white supremacy as being among the agency’s “highest priority threats.”
The Trump transition team and Patel did not respond to emails for this story.
Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, published last year, devotes the first eight chapters to the FBI and the Department of Justice, but says little to nothing about domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. The book only addresses domestic terrorism as a whole to argue that the FBI has exaggerated the problem for the purpose of unfairly maligning conservatives.
Patel, who prosecuted members of ISIS and al-Qaeda as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s counterterrorism division from 2013 to 2017, writes in a chapter entitled “Made-Up Domestic Terrorism” that “to pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data about domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”
As a source for his claim, the footnote in Patel’s book cites a news article about a letter written by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to Wray. Jordan wrote that a “whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification."
White supremacist violence in first Trump administration
The FBI told Raw Story that “between 2015 and 2019, the most lethal threat posed by domestic violent extremism in the United States was from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race.”
Those years bookend the June 2015 massacre carried out by 21-year-old Dylann Roof at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. that resulted in the deaths of nine African-American parishioners and the August 2019 mass shooting that targeted Latinos at an El Paso, Texas Walmart, taking the lives of 23 people.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security recognized 2019 as “the most lethal year for DVE attacks since 2015,” when Timothy McVeigh set off a bomb that at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
Shortly before 21-year-old Patrick Crusius opened fire at the Walmart in El Paso, gunman Patrick Crusius published a manifesto stating that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using a word that directly echoed Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections that a Central American migrant caravan approach the southern border was “an invasion.”
The following day, Trump issued a formal statement from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House that addressed the manifesto, while omitting any mention of his rhetoric.
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said.
“We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts,” he added. “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet, and stop mass murders before they start.”
His condemnation of the El Paso massacre notwithstanding, Trump has only escalated his rhetoric against immigrants since 2019.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump likened migrants crossing the southern border to “a military invasion,” while claiming that the United States was being “conquered” and “occupied by a foreign element.”
In other respects, Crusius’ manifesto didn’t just echo Trump’s own rhetoric, but forecasted positions that would be adopted by Trump and the GOP at large years later.
Crusius wrote: “The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate.”
Five years later, during his debate with Harris, Trump gestured towards his Democratic opponent, saying, “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”
Tom Homan, whom Trump has named as his “border czar” during the next administration, made a similar false claim during a speech at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania in October.
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan said. “This isn’t an accident, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design, folks…. They obviously perceive a political advantage, thinking maybe they are future Democratic voters.”
A key reason for the enduring appeal of accelerationism — the white supremacist ideology repeatedly cited by the FBI in charging documents for disrupted terror plots — is dehumanizing narratives in the political and media discourse, said Matt Kriner, the managing director of the Accelerationist Research Consortium.
“What we’re seeing now is there’s a lot of discussion in the mainstream media around the ‘great replacement’ theory,” Kriner told Raw Story. “That’s a central component of their radicalization gateway. You get this swirling mix of terrorist propaganda and manifestos and mainstreamed narratives like the anti-Haitian conspiracy in Springfield, which creates a highly toxic and compelling radicalization environment.”
This is the first in a two-part series on the FBI's efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots as Donald Trump returns to power. You can read Part 2 here.
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