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While President Donald Trump in the election campaign has targeted what he describes as violent left-wing extremists, the Department of Homeland Security recently declared that white racists and right-wing extremists pose the greatest security threat in the United States.
– Violent supporters of white supremacy pose the most persistent and deadly threat. , they concluded earlier this month.
Terror
The statistics leave no doubt as to who has been behind most of the terrorist plots and terrorist murders in the United States.
The Tankesmia Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has analyzed 61 terrorist attacks that took place or were prevented in the United States in the first eight months of the year.
The attacks are divided into four categories: religiously motivated, right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists and others.
Right-wing extremists were behind 67 percent, left-wing extremists were behind 20 percent, and extremist Islamists were behind 7 percent. Others, including supporters of the so-called Boogaloo movement, which also considers itself a right-wing extremist, were also behind 7 percent. , CSIS concludes a report.
More than half of all those killed in terrorist acts in the United States between 1994 and 2019 were killed by right-wing extremists, statistics show.
Yet in the past two years, 2018 and 2019, more than 90 percent of terrorism victims in the United States have been killed by right-wing extremists.
Watch video: Here Proud Boys and Antifa bark together in New York (2018)
Increasingly active
The Armed Conflict Location and Events Data Project (Acled) has also analyzed statistics and also mapped around 80 US militia groups in recent months, the vast majority of them right-wing extremists.
They conclude that far-right militias are becoming increasingly active and “pose a serious threat to the safety of American voters.”
Trump has come under fire for his unwillingness to clearly distance himself from right-wing extremist groups like the Proud Boys, rather than making statements they perceive as encouraging.
When Trump was pressured to do this during the first debate with Joe Biden, he asked the Proud Boys to step back, but to be prepared.
It can scare voters
Trump has also urged his supporters to appear at the polls to act as civil defense and make sure everything runs smoothly on Election Day, something that various militia groups say they intend to do.
Heavily armed and sometimes uniformed militiamen could scare voters, the FBI and others warn.
Militia groups are now active throughout the United States, although according to the Georgetown University Law Center, all states prohibit “unauthorized private militias and military units from engaging in government-sponsored activities, including enforcement of the law”.
“It is not prohibited to be a member of a group or movement that has extreme opinions in the United States,” former FBI agent Tom O’Connor told the Wall Street Journal.
– Only if these opinions lead to serious criminal acts, this becomes illegal, he points out.
Watch video: ABC explains the electoral system in the United States
Assassinations and coup plots
US prosecutors have repeatedly charged members of right-wing extremist militias who have planned assassinations, kidnappings and coups. This has often resulted in convictions for less serious crimes.
Joseph Morrison was recently arrested in Michigan, along with twelve other members of the Wolverine Watchmen militia, after police revealed they planned to kidnap the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Photo: AP
Several militiamen have been convicted of murder over the years, but without this having had consequences for the militias of which they have been members.
“It’s very difficult to get someone convicted of sedition,” says law professor Peter Henning of Wayne State University School of Law to the Wall Street Journal.
Many of the far-right militias have historically popped up in Michigan, where 13 men affiliated with the Wolverine Watchmen militia were recently arrested after plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people when they blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, both had ties to one of the militia groups in Michigan.
Tributes to Trump
According to the civil rights organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL), militia movements in the United States gained momentum when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, which was difficult for many right-wing and racist white extremists to assimilate.
Groups like the Oath Keepers today have thousands of members with military and law enforcement backgrounds, who have in common that they praise Donald Trump and claim that electoral fraud is the only thing that can deprive him of victory.
So do members of the Three Percenters, who also praise Trump as America’s savior.
Proud Boys are also represented across the country. The members often turn to violence, as do members of Boogaloo Bois, according to the Acled poll.
Fear of civil war
In 2019, the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center mapped up to 576 extremist groups in the United States, 181 of them armed militias.
With Trump in the White House, hatred of the federal government has subsided somewhat, the center claims, fearing a resurgence if Biden and the Democrats take office.
Although Latin American immigrants, Muslims, the elite, anti-fascists, the ‘deep state’ and other non-traditional targets have helped fuel the movement critical to the Trump administration, the movement has not forgotten its usual enemies, the federal authorities. and police, the center said.
Fears of what could happen if Trump loses the election, and neither he nor his supporters accept defeat, are growing in the United States.
One in three Americans estimates that the United States will experience a civil war within five years, a 2018 survey showed. Fear has not abated since then, and more and more Americans are arming themselves.
Purchase of weapons
So far this year, 17 million Americans have purchased handguns, according to a report by the research firm Small Arms Analytics.
The previous record was set in 2016, when the election was between Trump and Hillary Clinton. That year, 16.6 million small arms were sold in the United States, but that record was broken in September of this year.
Polls in election years are not uncommon in the United States, where the corona pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests have also helped more and more people arm themselves, many for the first time out of fear of illegal conditions, the studies.
Nearly 400 million firearms are now in the hands of American civilians, which is equivalent to about 120 guns per 100 residents.
Guns are not dusted, as statistics for the first three months of the crown pandemic clearly show. The number of incidents of gun violence later rose by nearly 8 percent, an investigative report shows.
If Trump loses the election, many fear that more weapons could be used.
