America's War on Terror breeds domestic terrorism
On August 3, 2019, the American far-right online forum 8chan published a post titled "The Inconvenient Truth" in support of the Christchurch Mosque shooting in New Zealand, and against a Hispanic "invasion" of Texas and the "cultural and ethnic replacement" of white people by ethnic minorities. Soon after it was posted, 21-year-old white male Patrick Wood Crusius, whom the police believed to be the author of the post, walked into a Walmart store in El Paso and opened fire at shoppers in opposition to the "great white replacement" he believed to be underway.
Before this day, a 2-month-old baby, Paul Anchondo, never knew he would lose both parents in an ordinary grocery shopping trip; a 60-year old veteran like Arturo Benavides might have never expected that even though he survived a war, he would die in an everyday event and leave behind his wife whom he had spent over 30 years with; 86-year old Angelina Englisbee had absolutely no idea that the phone call she had with her son at the cashier would be the last in her life…
The 2019 El Paso shooting in Texas led to 23 deaths. Although the deadliest attack in 2019, it was but one of the many far-right terrorist crimes to have occurred in the U.S. over the past few years. In August 2017, as thousands of white supremacists staged a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, 40 people were injured or killed; in October 2018, the white supremacist terrorist attack in Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue killed 11 and injured seven; On April 28, 2019, the Poway synagogue shooting in California left one dead; On January 6, 2021, the Capitol building saw severe chaos and casualties after Trump supporters at the instigation of right-wing extremists swarmed it in a bid to overturn the results of the 2020 general election…
The rise of homegrown terrorism, particularly the surge of far-right extremism, is one of the biggest threats to the U.S. today. American right-wing extremism has three main types: white supremacy, anti-government extremism and social ultraconservatism. The first is a kind of racism in nature, and it is the most popular and the fastest growing far-right ideology in the United States.
An important branch of anti-government extremism is the Militia Movement – mainly made up of ex-soldiers. The Militia Movement put up training camps that are actually the gathering place for white separatists. Although this extremist strand primarily targeted government authorities, it has become increasingly anti-immigration and anti-Muslim, overlapping with the white supremacist ideology since 2008 when Barack Obama became the U.S. president.
Social ultraconservatism is a movement and ideology calling for a return to the American tradition. It includes anti-abortion extremism, anti-gay extremism, anti-immigration extremism and involuntary celibacy (Incel). Many social ultraconservatist movements, for example, the Incel movement, anti-immigrationism and anti-Semitism, share ideological similarities with white supremacy.
In 2019, 48 Americans were killed in domestic terrorist attacks, 39 of them by white supremacists. Although less people died in 2020 for this reason, the number of domestic terrorist plots and attacks was at the highest level since 1994, with two-thirds of them being conducted by right-wing extremists.
The rise of far-right forces in the American society is fundamentally enabled by a strong sense of frustration and an identity crisis among the white people due to the deterioration of their financial situation and the marginalization of their culture. This is a result of drastic economic and structural changes in American society. It is also inextricably linked with American government's endless "War on Terror."