Read ADL’s comprehensive report, A Dark and Constant Rage: 25
Years of Right-Wing Terrorism in the United States (PDF).
In March 2017, a white supremacist from Maryland, James
Harris Jackson, traveled to New York City with the alleged intention of
launching a series of violent attacks on black men to discourage white women
from having relationships with black men. After several days, Jackson chose his
first victim, a 66-year old black homeless man, Timothy Caughman. Jackson later allegedly admitted that he had
stabbed Caughman with a small sword he had brought with him, describing the
murder as a “practice run.”
However, after the killing, Jackson’s angry energy
dissipated and he turned himself over to the authorities. A week later, New York prosecutors announced
that they were charging him with second-degree murder as a hate crime and also
with a state charge of terrorism.
Jackson’s aborted killing spree was a shocking example of right-wing
terror in the United States but it was unfortunately far from an isolated
example.
For over a century and a half, since “burning Kansas” of
the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s, right-wing terrorism has been an
unwelcome feature of the American landscape.
Yet today, many people are barely aware that it exists and most people
don’t recognize its frequency or scope.
Far more attention in recent years has been given to the
threat of homegrown radical Islamic terror—a danger that has generated such
horrific acts as the Orlando and San Bernardino shooting sprees. Yet the very real specter of radical Islamic
terror in the United States has existed alongside an equally serious threat of
terror from right-wing extremist groups and individuals.
Both movements have generated shooting sprees, bombings,
and a wide variety of plots and conspiracies.
Both pose threats so significant that to ignore either would be to
invite tragedy.
To illustrate the threat of right-wing terrorism in the
United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has compiled a
list of 150 right-wing terrorist acts, attempted acts, plots and conspiracies
from the past 25 years (1993-2017).
These include terrorist incidents from a wide variety of white
supremacists, from neo-Nazis to Klansmen to racist skinheads, as well as
incidents connected to anti-government extremists such as militia groups,
sovereign citizens and tax protesters.
The list also includes incidents of anti-abortion terror as well as from
other, smaller right-wing extremist movements.
ADL’s Center on Extremism defines terrorism as a
pre-planned act or attempted act of significant violence by one or more
non-state actors in order to further an ideological, social or religious cause,
or to harm perceived opponents of such causes.
Significant violent acts can include bombings or use of other weapons of
mass destruction, assassinations and targeted killings, shooting sprees, arsons
and firebombings, kidnappings and hostage situations and, in some cases, armed
robberies. Domestic terrorism consists
of acts or attempted acts of terrorism in which the perpetrators are citizens
or permanent residents of the country in which the act takes place.
The right-wing terrorist incidents in ADL’s list include
those that best fit the above criteria.
They are drawn from the much larger pool of violent and criminal acts
that American right-wing extremists engage in every year, from hate crimes to
deadly encounters with law enforcement.
Right-wing extremists annually murder a number of Americans, but only
some of those murders occur in connection with terrorist acts. There are, after all, hundreds of thousands
of adherents of right-wing extremist movements in the United States and all
such movements have some degree of association with criminal activity. No one should think, therefore, that the
incidents listed here represent the breadth of right-wing violence in the
U.S. But, as acts of terrorism, they do
show right-wing movements at their most vicious and ambitious.
