Big White Lies

While delivering his first speech to Congress as President in February 2017, Donald Trump declared that “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”

Like any good propaganda, the new President’s assertion was, strictly speaking, accurate, even if it completely misrepresented the truth. Study after study has found homegrown terrorism—specifically right-wing extremism by white men—poses a far greater threat to national security than the international Islamic extremism Trump deceptively referred to. His largely unchallenged scare tactic would be the basis for his bans on travelers and immigrants from a number of Islamic-majority countries and for erecting a wall on our southern border. (Because Islamic terrorists can’t walk across the Canadian border?)

Between 2001 and 2015, according to a study by the nonpartisan think tank New America, far more people were killed in the U.S. by homegrown rightwing extremists than by Islamic terrorists. A more recent 2017 study by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) found similar numbers. From 2008 to 2016 there were nearly twice as many incidents of domestic extremist attacks versus Islamist incidents, and the homegrown ones were more often deadly. (For the record, the CIR also found attacks by left-wing ideologues to be vanishingly rare.)

Almost one year after Trump’s initial address to Congress, while hoping to bolster his increasingly extreme anti-immigrant policies, the Justice Department released a report claiming “Three Out of Four Individuals Convicted of International Terrorism and Terrorism-Related Offenses Were Foreign-Born.” Based on 549 individuals convicted of federal inter – national terrorism charges between September 11, 2001, and the end of 2016, the report concluded that “approximately 73%…were foreign-born.”