The coronavirus pandemic and the riots provoked by the left-wing extremists from Black Lives Matter allowed the right-wing radicals, who are pushing the US into civil war, to step out of the shadows
According to The Guardian, in the American expert community all the blame is laid on Donald Trump for the heyday of right-wing extremism. The President of the United States during the debate with Joe Biden did not condemn the actions of such groups. According to many Trump critics, this was enough to make radicals feel that they have impunity.
“This is by far the most serious internal danger in the US on many levels – the frequency of attacks, the level of recruitment, the scale of the groups’ ambitions and the wider political capital they create”, – comments terrorism and extremism expert Wanda Felbab Brown.
Although the pandemic has indeed been a catalyst for right-wing activity in the United States, and the riots over the murder of a black recidivist, George Floyd, have encouraged them to take up arms, more radical violence has been observed since 2007.
Michael Herman, a former FBI undercover agent for ultra-right groups, notes that extremists have been reinforced over the years, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is ignoring this.
“I want to see arrests, investigations, I want to know what the FBI really does. I suspect that the data will show that there have been many deaths due to white supremacists, but disproportionately few investigations”, – he complains.
The use of FBI resources explains this concern. The Bureau spends 80% of its forces fighting the external terrorist threat and only 20% fighting the internal one. At the same time, even the agency’s statistics for the period from 2008 to 2018 show that 73% of all attacks in the U.S. were carried out by ultra-right terrorists and only 23% by radical Islamists.
Moreover, the right are actively establishing ties with law enforcement agencies and penetrating into police ranks. For example, last week Boogaloo Bois, a group that advocates a civil war in the United States, held an illegal rally outside a police station in Newport News, Virginia.
Instead of arresting radicals for violating the ban on the use of firearms in the city, the police chief handed their leader a bottle of chocolate milk and allowed him to address like-minded people through a microphone courtesy of the police. Despite all this, the Ministry of Justice does not have a national strategy for identifying the ultra-right among law enforcement officials.