This is kind of interesting given the apparent statements made:
Domestic terrorism : Perpetrated by individuals and/or groups inspired by or associated with primarily U.S.-based movements that espouse extremist ideologies of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
–for example, the June 8, 2014 Las Vegas shooting, during which two police officers inside a restaurant were killed in an ambush-style attack, which was committed by a married couple who held anti-government views and who intended to use the shooting to start a revolution.
Contrasted with:
A definition which neatly captures white supremacists and has no mention of a ‘foreign element’ being required. Although there is that weasely term ‘primarily’ which could be argued to mean ‘not exclusively’.
One tiddly sentence about how ‘domestic terrorism’ is an ongoing issue and a whole massive paragraph about homegrown violent extremists (which as a term without further definition would seem to cover white supremacists nicely) which in fact turns out to be all about those nasty muslims.
So, let me get this straight. You hope that congress, having recognized a problem, will actually do something about it? Oh, my child, you have much to learn. And welcome to BB!
So context is necessary for AOC’s citations and such.
tl;dr AOC’s questions and concerns are valid and raise the prospect that more needs to be done, not just by the FBI, but by DoJ writ large and by Congress, but her takeaway that white supremacists are getting off the hook is an extreme interpretation that matches the facts, but don’t match it as well other hypotheses.
So the FBI rep, and I genuinely wish had had time to prepare and I’m surprised he did as well as he did, makes a point that if you look at Title 18 USC 113 A or B, there’s no real crime there to charge in the Charleston or Pittsburgh attacks.
People assume that you can just charge someone with conducting domestic terrorism and that’s not really true. It’s a stacking charge; you tack it onto other charges like murder, explosives, firearms, and/or hate crimes.
The reason that the San Bernadino and Pulse club shooters associates were charged with terrorism charges is that they were supporting foreign terrorist operations, which is illegal if you look at the law. Remember, the attackers in those cases weren’t charged with anything – the three of them died in shootouts. Their associates were charged with crimes like providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations – because even though they were self-radicalized in the US, there was still a foreign terrorist connection.
So the situation here is more that the FBI isn’t legally empowered to tackle domestic terrorism in the same way they can tackle foreign terrorist attacks in the US. But there are things we can do legally. Pass more statutes related to domestic terrorism and designate groups (like Atomwaffen or Rise Above Movement) as domestic terrorist organizations. Then you can start to see more domestic terrorism charges on white supremacist attacks.
Now this isn’t to absolve the FBI in ignoring the threat of white supremacists. I’m sure there are agents or even supervisory agents who ignore it or believe it doesn’t exist. But I don’t think the conclusion that the agency doesn’t charge white supremacists as terrorism b/c foreigners are scary is the most legit conclusion.
The FBI puts out advisory letters to other LEOs in the US warning about the terror potential of AntiFa and urging them to support “anti-antifa”, which if the FBI wasn’t so badly infiltrated by white supremacists, would just call fascists.
what makes your comment so very hard to take is that there has been a 20-25 year history of republican legislators pressuring the fbi and the justice department into backing off investigations of right-wing groups like militias, anti-tax rebels, sovereign citizen groups etc. there has also been a longer history of federal agents investigating and harassing left-wing groups which were non-violent. of course they’re having a field day with a group like antifa who do not eschew violent tactics when faced with physical violence themselves.
the fbi has certainly shown themselves capable of tackling domestic left-wing groups without any foreign connections. given the way the right-wing militias and white supremacist groups travel across state lines and do things like seizing federal lands, the fbi could easily investigate them and charge them with any number of federal crimes. why they don’t do this with right-wing groups comes down to two things–
they’re skittish at having been warned off by powerful republican legislators or by representatives of republican presidents.
they’re friendly with right-wing extremists because they’re more comfortable with white-supremacists and proto-fascists than they are with leftists.
it isn’t mysterious and it doesn’t require a convoluted series of excuses.
Seizing federal lands happened once and a bunch of those guys went to jail shortly thereafter. And they’ve certainly been able to investigate and tackle domestic violent groups, but the point in question is why certain cases aren’t handled as domestic terrorism, not just whether they can or can’t.
I mean, I totally agree that white supremacist allies in the govt have been pressuring DoJ to look away from anti-government militias and neo-nazis because they’re just “gun enthusiasts” or “First amendment reasons” and I don’t doubt that folk in the govt either sympathize or support neo-nazis (first-hand experience).
But that also neither disproves my point about how for the cases mentioned thus far, what charges related to terrorism would there have been?
I still think it’s very strange how the FBI doesn’t have any trouble classifying organizations like ACORN domestic eco-terrorists, and claiming they’re a huge problem compared with white supremacists who actually kill people.
Assuming you mean ALF/ELF, the difference is that rich developers with congresscritters on speed dial probably had some input into getting the FBI to take an aggressive stance against eco-terrorists. Similarly, there are a lot of folk who’d probably take the FBI to task for investigating what are obviously gun enthusiasts exercising their 2nd Amendment rights while also goosestepping, reading Mein Kampf and engaging in what’s obviously protected speech that involves planning attacks on protesters.
But even if you look at all of the FBI’s work against ELF, it was basically all arson charges and conspiracy charges.
But there should be a vector for designating groups domestic terrorists the same way we designate groups foreign terrorists, and I really really hope that AOC starting this convo leads us there.
Just jumping in to point out the irony of the “legality” of federal lands that were obtained through broken treaties, war, and genocide. Totally a white supremacy issue, if you ask me.
i’m not really attempting to disprove your “point” because it’s irrelevant to the larger conversation. the domestic groups don’t have to be dealt with under terrorism laws to be investigated for their interstate criminal activities. your attempt to go off on a tangent about terrorism is almost a derailment and has nothing much to do with my point, as well as aoc’s point. that federal law enforcement agencies are giving a pass to right-wing groups engaged in criminal conduct within the u.s. and my reasons for why that is still stand–flack from republican legislators who are sympathetic to right-wing groups combined with an unfortunate tendency of federal agents as well as state and local law enforcement officers to sympathize with right-wing groups.
It’s AOC’s entire point, no? She’s asking why the FBI pursues Islamic extremist attacks as terrorism while white supremacist attacks are hate crimes and not domestic terrorism.
that’s part of her point but there is also a larger point to be made, which was my main point. that being that violence and attacks by right-wing groups are being virtually ignored while violence from left-wing groups and by people with ties to other countries, either political or familial, is immediately investigated and frequently labeled as terrorists, often before there is enough information to make a full determination. my take on aoc’s questions and statements lead me to feel that she brought up the terrorism angle to demonstrate the difference in how federal law enforcement deals with right-wing versus left-wing threats and groups.
while the discussion of the “terror” label might have been the primary point of her questioning, the collateral point of the distinctions federal agencies make between right-wing and left-wing violence and/or groups is there as well and that represents the starting point of my commenting here. i haven’t hidden the basis of my comments and i’m trying to make sure that i’m not moving the goalposts in my discussion of the issues. if you believe i’m making an argument in bad faith please point out where i went off the rails and i will be glad to either clarify my intentions or make a retraction.
On the local front, this stands out as particularly egregious:
Then there are the American cops regularly caught with 14/88, Iron Cross, and other fascist tattoos.
Law enforcement usually tends to side with conservative authoritarians, especially white male ones, to one degree or another. That’s really what Ocasio-Cortez is getting at, and the way he fumbled around to find some footing shows that her larger point is a valid one. It’s important that she make the point about LEOs now, before the partisan divide gets more toxic and violent than it already is.
