It’s now ‘Us v. Us’: Rethinking terrorism after Jan. 6 riot

America has long understood terrorism as us versus them. That is, acts of terrorism were an assault on shared values of democracy and political stability. Terrorism was found only outside our collective ethical and moral conscience. It was grounded in far-away lands and based on someone else’s cultural, national or religious extremism. The goal was to repel it, even if that meant limiting civil liberties and curtailing privacy in the cause of defeating the enemy. We may have debated the means to fight terrorism, but we seldom questioned its nature.

The United States experienced this special brand of horror and harm over several decades as terrorists used repugnant methods to scare us into leaving a region or to force us into cowering at home. The bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 in Beirut, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the coordinated bombings of embassies in several African countries in 1998 and the attacks of 9/11 are well-known examples of Americans being targets of violence as a means to inflict a broader fear. These acts and others defined the modern era of terrorism for a world-dominant America.

The bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and the mass murder of 168 people inside in 1995 was the domestic exception to the perceived pattern of foreigners using violence to defeat the American system. Timothy McVeigh didn’t match the accepted profile of a terrorist; he was white and a veteran.

His crimes were addressed through the existing federal criminal laws, and after conviction, he was ultimately executed as punishment. But he was considered an outlier.

The country now faces the cold, damning reality that McVeigh wasn’t so rare a phenomenon. The attempted takeover of the Capitol by violent means on Jan. 6 wasn’t by foreign enemies fueled by hatred of America. A loose constellation of American far-right extremists planned and perpetrated the Capitol assault. They justified the attack with an obscene vision of their America. One might be tempted to believe this is a shift, a change, from foreign terrorism to homegrown terrorism. However, the emergence of domestic terrorism isn’t really an emergence at all, but a belated recognition of what has existed for many decades in this country. And the common thread is bigotry.

Civil rights crimes and domestic terrorism are borne of the same union of hate and violence. For example, the Ku Klux Klan was founded on white supremacy and a twisted notion of Christianity, but the organization also possessed political goals that propelled its early growth. The end of Reconstruction with the retrenching and enforcement of discriminatory laws meant that the Klan, in large measure, achieved those goals. The group’s reemergence in the 1920s and again in the

1950s and ’60s were responses to economic and social issues, not any sudden rise in racism. The bigotry was always present. And importantly, the Klan’s use of violence wasn’t an anomaly or an exception, but a natural extension of its very DNA.

Other American extremist groups built on the racial goals and violent methods the Klan, including various neo-Nazi and skinhead groups. Now, it’s time to combine these hate groups with the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and others under the label of domestic hate-based extremism. The list is long.

Once we reframe most acts of domestic terrorism as essentially civil rights/hate based crimes and many civil rights/hate crimes committed by members of groups as terrorism, the notion of us versus them has to change too. It is now us versus us. The body politic isn’t being invaded by an external threat as much as it is now harboring, even hosting, the danger.

An updated paradigm of thinking about violence by domestic extremists should result in new and creative ways to hold them accountable. One recent example is U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., filing a civil suit against Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani relating to the Capitol attack using a Reconstruction Era civil rights statute. Some of the Capitol attackers could also be charged with criminal civil rights violations. It is a federal civil rights crime to use violence to interfere with the exercise of a person’s protected activities when the violence is committed with a particular intent. The extremists who were spewing forth racial insults while invading the Capitol, shouting antisemitic slogans or seeking to find and attack the Speaker of the House and other female House members all while threatening them with gender-based slurs should be candidates for criminal civil rights charges. Those charges may well require heightened proof to obtain a conviction, but sometimes the harder truth is worth telling.

The country must confront in and out of court the enemies who would injure and kill based on hate. It’s past time to identify who they really are — they are some of us.

Michael McAuliffe is a former federal prosecutor serving both as a civil rights prosecutor at the Department of Justice and as a supervisory assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at William & Mary’s Law School and a senior lecturing fellow at Duke University School of Law.

By Michael Mcauliffe