Why the Far-Right Terrorist Threat Is Often Misunderstood and Underestimated

AUTHORS: BRUCE HOFFMAN, JACOB WARE

Originally published by Council on Foreign Relations on 26 February 2024

On August 26, 2023, a lone gunman entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, and opened fire. Having previously attempted to attack the nearby Edward Waters University—a historically Black university—and sporting Nazi iconography on his firearms, the gunman was a white supremacist hunting for African Americans to kill. He was tragically successful. Three people were murdered. The gunman then took his own life.

That attack was the latest in a dark succession of far-right, mostly white-supremacist attacks targeting minority communities across the United States. From Poway, California, to Buffalo, New York, the shattered lives provided fresh evidence that the same ideology which drove the United States into civil war continues today. But, as we reveal in our new CFR book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, the threat posed by the violent far-right is both broader and more entrenched today than many imagine. Minority communities may be the most frequently and viciously targeted, but the extremists of the violent far-right have wider ambitions.

For starters, as serious as the threat is to minority communities, Democratic politicians and leaders are also the targets of this violence. Whether the COVID-era assassination threats against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer or the election-related attempt on Nancy Pelosi’s life that seriously injured her husband, violent far-right extremists have focused on what to their minds are particularly high-value targets. But equally consequentially, Republican politicians have also been targeted by the movement. The premier exemplar of this fratricidally intended violence was the gallows erected outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to hang the sitting vice president, Mike Pence. More recent vitriol has been directed against the Republican opposition to Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) candidacy for Speaker of the House; by a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri against so-called RINOs (Republicans in name only); and even toward local election officials—such as the Republican chairwoman of Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers, who was sent graphic images threatening her and her daughter over the chair’s approval of the county’s 2020 election results. These plots are part of an extremist strategy to foment chaos and disorder and thereby disrupt the United States’ democratic processes by attacking its elected representatives.

The Republican party, however, is not the only institution cherished by American conservatives that finds itself under assault by the violent far-right: both the U.S. military and American law enforcement have in recent years been targeted by extremists both for infiltration as well as in actual violent plots. The challenge is well summarized by Ethan Melzer, who joined the U.S. Army in what his neo-Nazi group called an “insight role.” Melzer later attempted to orchestrate an al-Qaeda attack on his own unit while on an overseas deployment. The threat to law enforcement is even more alarming, as the January 6 violence directed against U.S. Capitol police and other law enforcement, as well as a lone gunman’s unsuccessful assault on a Cincinnati FBI office in 2022, have shown.

The threat against minority communities, politicians from both parties, and infiltration of the military and law enforcement underscore a broader threat that must now be taken as given: the violent far-right seeks to destroy the liberal democratic state and impose an authoritarian, repressive one in its place. Accordingly, their attention has often fastened on government buildings. The Turner Diaries, a 1978 racist screed that remains a blueprint for white supremacist revolution, detailed terrorist acts such as a bombing of the FBI headquarters and a mass lynching called the Day of the Rope—inspirations for real-world reincarnations at Oklahoma City in 1995 and the U.S. Capitol twenty-six years later. In the words of leading terrorism scholars Pete Simi and Seamus Hughes, the range of threats represents a “slow burn threatening our democracy” that may “normalize political violence and stymie civic engagement and democratic processes.”

Although the domestic implications of this rising force are serious enough, the foreign policy and soft power effects are perhaps even more consequential. In fact, the United States has emerged as an exporter of these noxious ideologies, as American far-right extremist ideology and tactics have metastasized to countries such as New Zealand and Brazil, where they also pose serious threats to life while undermining political institutions. A terrorist who murdered fifty-one members of the Muslim community in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 wrote that he “chose firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the affect it could have on the politics of United States and thereby the political situation of the world.” In Brazil, January 2023 saw an election riot at the capital city’s government center, weaponizing the very same electoral conspiracy theories—and involving similar tactics—as the January 6 attack in Washington, DC. In a year in which an unprecedented number of elections will take place around the world, a weakened American democracy will provide a blueprint for dictators and autocrats who wish to ignore the wills of their electorates and protect their own power.

The far-right’s violence against minority communities—as seen in Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Buffalo, and Jacksonville—is the movement’s tip of the spear, the most violent and visible manifestation of its vitriol. But the threat, as our book explains, is far broader, embracing a limitless collection of enemies targeted for violence. It is, therefore, an existential threat against the American way of life, and by extension, the rules-based international order the United States has championed since the end of World War II.

In other words, a failure to seriously deal with this rising threat risks changing the country and the world forever.

This post was written for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Renewing America initiative—an effort established on the premise that for the United States to succeed, it must fortify the political, economic, and societal foundations fundamental to its national security and international influence. Renewing America evaluates nine critical domestic issues that shape the ability of the United States to navigate a demanding, competitive, and dangerous world. For more Renewing America resources, visit https://www.cfr.org/programs/renewing-america and follow the initiative on Twitter @RenewingAmerica.