US struggles to confront far right threat

The violent assault on the US Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump underscored how unready the United States is to confront its growing right-wing extremist threat, despite years of warnings.

The FBI only acknowledged three years ago, after several mass shootings, that the far right poses a significantly greater terror danger than militants.

Yet law enforcement was unprepared when an array of groups of die-hard Trump supporters, Qanon conspiracists and white supremacists stormed the seat of Congress on January 6, egged on by the president and his political cronies.

After the attack, members of Congress called them “terrorists” and “insurrectionists.”

But many lawmakers have cultivated the same people as supporters for years, making it hard to treat them as an ongoing threat the way the IS group is, said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who is now chief executive of the Soufan Group. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a political will to go after these individuals proactively,” Soufan said. “We wait for them to do something, and then we react.”

There is no number to put on the size of the far right, because there are many groups over a broad spectrum — some benign activists, some conspiracy mongers and some violent neonazis.

But they count on significant support from the US population. A Quinnipiac poll released on Monday said 10 per cent of voters believed the people who stormed the Congress were “defending democracy.”

That makes it harder to track threats, compared to monitoring for radical sentiment among a relatively small minority population.

“What happens if you are looking for revolutionary-right terrorists among 30 per cent of the population?” said Matthew Feldman of the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right in Britain. Even if profilers narrowed that to white men in a certain age range, he said, “You’re looking at 20 million people.”

That puts the potential extremists in every walk of life — including, as the Capitol attack showed, among police themselves. And all are potentially dangerous, given the widespread gun ownership in the United States.

A second problem, Feldman said, is that militant ideology stands out clearly, while rightwing extremism “is next to the mainstream in American discourse,” even openly touted in popular conservative media.

Extremism expert William Braniff says the government still under-allocates resources for monitoring and investigating the domestic extremist threat, compared to what it does for international threats.

And that doesn’t make sense because domestic extremist attacks show a 60-per cent success rate, said Braniff, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

Moreover, law enforcement lacks the legal powers needed to disrupt a domestic plot ahead of time, whereas these powers exist for international threats.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a political will to go after these individuals proactively. We wait for them to do something, and then we react

ALI SOUFAN A former FBI agent