The US is at an increased risk of domestic terror attacks by rightwing \u201clone wolf\u201d actors, experts have warned, as inflammatory Republican rhetoric around a variety of issues seems likely to continue ahead of the 2024 election.
The number of attacks by adherents to rightwing ideology has soared since 2016, as Republican lies about election interference, and escalating rhetoric from the right about minority groups, have served to \u201cprovide mechanisms\u201d for individuals to become radicalized, an analyst said.
As the threat of domestic rightwing terrorism rises, researchers say individuals, rather than organized groups, are now far more likely to commit what analysts call \u201ccrimes inspired by extremist ideology\u201d.
There have been a series of such attacks in recent years. In May 2022 a white supremacist killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The attacker said he had chosen the location because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year.
A self-described white nationalist killed 23 people and injured 22 in a shooting in El Paso, on the border of Mexico and the US, in 2019, in an anti-immigration attack targeting Hispanic people.
In recent years a white supremacist killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, while just this week a man was arrested after he crashed a rented truck into bollards near the White House. The man subsequently praised Adolf Hitler to investigators and said he intended to \u201ckill the president\u201d, according to charging documents.
\u200bMichael Jensen, senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start) at the University of Maryland, said 70% of individuals committing terrorist acts in the US are individuals, or part of \u201cisolated cliques\u201d \u2013 small groups of three to four people.
\u201cThat said, these individuals might be lone actors, but they\u2019re not lonely actors,\u201d Jensen said.
\u201cThey are embedded in these online ecosystems where they are exchanging ideas with each other all day every day.\u201d
Jensen leads the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (Pirus) project, a database tracking how US extremists came to be radicalized.
According to the data, 90% of the cases of US terrorists are classed as domestic. Of the domestic extremists, 95% are far-right, Jensen said: white supremacists, Proud Boys, anti-immigrant groups and anti-government groups.
There has been a worrying increase in the number of attacks. Prior to 2016, Jensen and his team logged about 150 individuals a year who were \u201ccommitting crimes inspired by extremist ideology\u201d.
Since 2016, the number of people committing such crimes has jumped to about 300-350 cases a year, Jensen said \u2013 not including a huge spike in 2021 as a result of the January 6 insurrection.
As the number of incidents have risen, there have been changes in how people come to rightwing terrorism.
\u201cBefore the internet and before social media, how an individual was likely to radicalize is that it was going to be through a face-to-face relationship that they had in the physical world,\u201d Jensen said.
\u201cSo they had a cousin that was involved in a skinhead gang and they recruited them, or there was a group active in their neighborhood and they saw a flyer and took an interest in it.
\u201cIt was a much more labor-intensive process to get people involved.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n