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Biden Claims White Supremacy Is "Greatest Terrorism Threat" Facing America

  • by:
  • Source: Bongino
  • 05/15/2023
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Over the weekend Joe Biden decided to lie to the 2023 graduating class of Howard University, telling graduates of the historically black research university that white supremacy was the greatest threat facing America.  

"The harsh reality of racism has long torn us apart. It’s a battle. It’s never really over, but on the best days, enough of us have the guts and the hearts to stand up for the best in us, to choose love over hate” Biden said. "Union over disunion. Progress over retreat. To stand up against the poison of White supremacy like I did in my inaugural address to single it out as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland."

After some applause, Biden added that he definitely wasn’t just saying this to pander. "I'm not saying this because I'm at a Black HBCU. I say it wherever I go."

One origin of this claim in the Biden-era seems to be from misinterpreting comments from FBI Director Chris Wray. During congressional testimony, Democrat representative Elissa Slotkin asked him about how many domestic terror cases or arrests involve white supremacists, to which he replied “What I can tell you is that, within the domestic terrorism bucket category as a whole, racially-motivated violent extremism is, I think, the biggest bucket within that larger group, and within the racially-motivated violent extremists bucket, people subscribing to some kind of white supremacist-type ideology is certainly the biggest chunk of that.”

What Wray said here is that within the category of domestic terrorist incidents that are racially motivated, racial attacks motivated by white supremacy are the most common. Yet, probably by design, Wray’s comments here have been interpreted as saying that white supremacist incidents are the number one terror threat overall, not simply the biggest terror threat within the sub category of “racially motivated incidents.” Without any actual percentages from Wray it’s impossible to calculate whether racially motivated incidents are in fact a majority. 

In a given year, deaths from terrorist incidents make up a fraction of a percent of all homicides, so portraying a claimed “greatest terror threat” as a “greatest threat” facing the country overall is irresponsible on Biden’s part. Regardless, the data is a bit more complicated than Biden and his fellow propagandists would like you to think.  

As I wrote in my forthcoming book Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers

While too small a sample to extrapolate from, the FBI’s top ten most wanted terror list is composed of two members of the May 19th Communist Organization, two far-left black nationalists, an eco-terrorist, a white member of the Black Panthers, and the leftist who allegedly participated in the 1970 bombing of the University of Wisconsin to protest the Vietnam war. Only three men on the list didn’t have a political motive for their alleged crimes, and they were all accused of different hijacking incidents.

As if the bar for what’s classified as right-ring extremism couldn’t be lower, a whistleblower recently told Representative Jim Jordan that FBI “agents are not finding enough domestic violent extremist [DVE] cases” and “are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification.” Another whistleblower said that FBI officials “have pressured agents to move cases into the DVE category to hit self-created performance metrics” that are used for promotions.

[In arguing white supremacist incidents are the greatest terror threat facing the U.S.] PolitiFact’s Amy Sherman reached out to Michael Jensen, an investigator at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism, who pointed her to a September 4th article by Politico about a draft report at the DHS that identified white supremacists as the greatest terror threat to the United States. The final report would end up concluding that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”

She also cited the following evidence, claiming that:

  • Data sets maintained by think tanks and university researchers match the federal government’s warnings about white supremacy. START’s Global Terrorism Database shows that from 2015 to 2019, white supremacists were responsible for more attacks in the U.S. than other types of extremists.
  • A separate study of terrorist incidents by the Center for Strategic and International Security in June 2020 found “the most significant threat likely comes from white supremacists, though anarchists and religious extremists inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda could present a potential threat as well.”

Each of these studies and their flaws is worth going through individually.

  • The DHS Study: This study was only measuring terrorist attacks from the year 2018–2019. It found that over that time period, violent extremists perpetrated sixteen attacks, and forty-eight people were killed. Half were committed by “white supremacist extremists” and accounted for a majority of the deaths (thirty-nine). More than half (twenty-three) of these are attributable to a single killer, the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shooting.
  • The START Global Terrorism Database: The time frame here measured is 2015-2019, and while it’s at least longer than the prior, study still isn’t much. This study found that of 310 terrorist attacks over that time period, thirty-four (11 percent) were committed by white supremacists, who accounted for sixty-four (20 percent) deaths. Sherman completely ignores the data that contradicts her point—that jihadist attacks killed eighty-six over the same time period.
  •  The Center for Strategic and International Security: This study examines from 1994 to 2020, correctly notes that Islamists are responsible for the greatest number of fatalities because of 9/11, and then tries to downplay that because it harms their conclusion that white supremacists are a greater threat.

Similarly, a 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study titled “Countering Violent Extremism” has been used by members of Congress to bolster the same thesis. Cory Booker cited the study when telling CNN in 2018 that “in American history since 9/11, we’ve had 85 major attacks in our country, 73 percent of them have been by white nationalist hate groups.” In what is the most convenient timeline possible for researchers looking to downplay Islamic extremism, the GAO report begins measuring terrorist incidents as of September 12, 2001.

Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros


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