Global Right-Wing Extremism Networks Are Growing. The U.S. Is Just Now Catching Up. ProPublica 1/22/2021
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
During the past two years, U.S. counterterrorism officials held meetings with their European counterparts to discuss an emerging threat: right-wing terror groups becoming increasingly global in their reach.
American neo-Nazis were traveling to train and fight with militias in the Ukraine. There were suspected links between U.S. extremists and the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was training foreigners in its St. Petersburg compounds. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 had denounced a “Hispanic invasion” and praised a white supremacist who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and who had been inspired by violent American and Italian racists.
The FBI warned Congress about domestic terrorism. Why didn t anyone listen?
The Senate, like the House, can’t plead ignorance to the growing dangers of domestic terrorism.
Recent reporting raises the specter of an inside job when it comes to violent domestic terrorists. Anjali Nair / MSNBC; Getty Images
Jan. 21, 2021, 6:35 PM UTC / Updated Jan. 21, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC
The finger-pointing started even before the violent rioters could be cleared from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The Capitol Police, the FBI and the departments of Defense and Homeland Security have been cited separately and collectively as potentially culpable for failing either to see the intelligence pointing to the assault on democracy and/or to act on what they should have known was coming.