The Rising Worry Over Far-Right Terrorism

Federal authorities have accused Mark Adams Prieto, 58 of Prescott, Ariz., with plotting a mass shooting at a concert in May in Atlanta. Prieto, seen above in undercover photos by the FBI, allegedly hoped the shooting would spark a "race war" ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

AUTHORS: BRUCE HOFFMAN AND JACOB WARE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION ON 18 JUNE 2024

The alleged would-be terrorist had only reached New Mexico on his cross-country voyage when he was stopped by law enforcement on Interstate 40. Leaving Arizona, he had packed his car with seven firearms. His target, according to a Department of Justice news release from his mid-June indictment, was a concert in Atlanta, where his intention was to incite a race war before the 2024 presidential election by carrying out a mass shooting of African Americans and other minorities.

Atlanta was the scene of an attack in April when an intruder attempted to crash through the protective barrier of the FBI’s field office. A South Carolina man arrested at the scene reportedly had posted numerous conspiracy theories online, including ideas frequently shared by Q-Anon adherents. The incident followed a similar attack on an FBI field office in Cincinnati in August 2022, after the raid on former President Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Atlanta, of course, is no stranger to far-right terrorism. Twenty-eight years ago, a bomb exploded in Centennial Park during the Olympic Games, killing one person and injuring more than a hundred others.

Credit: Handout

Bruce Hoffman

Credit: Handout

Jacob Ware

The latest incident is likely to reignite an old debate over which ideology poses the most serious domestic terrorist threat in the United States today: the far-left or the far-right? Like many other contentious issues in an election year, this has become a highly charged, partisan debate with some identifying Black Lives Matter, antifa and anarchists as the most worrisome threat and others white supremacists and white nationalists and various racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic anti-LGBTQ and xenophobic causes. Significantly, both extremes have strong anti-government elements, as reflected in recent polls that showed roughly a third of Democrats and Republicans — the highest percent ever — believe that in certain circumstances violence against the government could be justified. Atlanta, in fact, has become a focus of far-left extremists who seek to block the continued construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center.

But despite this intersection of animus to government, these two extremes have vastly different capacities for violence and pose significantly different threats. For example, no recent lethal mass shootings — the most frequent manifestation of terrorism in the United States today — have been linked to the far-left. Yet, attacks from violent, far-right extremists have been as sustained as they have been lethally consequential. The 2015 attack at the historic Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C., tragically claimed nine lives. In 2018, a xenophobic gunman opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh killing 11. In 2019, another xenophobe murdered 23 at a Walmart in El Paso. In 2022 at the Tops supermarket in an African-American community in Buffalo, a gunman killed 10 persons. And, there was a similar incident at a supermarket in Jacksonville, Fla., in August that killed three people.

Less vigilance on the part of law enforcement might have resulted in Atlanta being added to the list. Moreover, as we document in our new book, “God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America,” this tragic list is just a slice of the violence attributed to far-right extremists.

Against this litany of carnage from the far-right, only one incident of great significance can be attributed to the far-left: the attack in June 2017 by a person claiming to be a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who opened fire at a Republican team practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, Va. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., was gravely wounded, before his Capitol Police detail returned fire, killing the gunman. “Our lives were saved by the Capitol Hill police. Had they not been there it would’ve been a massacre,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., reflected.